Book 18: The Peach Keeper

Finished: March
Pages: 273

Things to remember:
The way you feel when you finish a book that makes you feel confident in yourself, your abilities, your hope for love.
Being able to imagine a world with that much magic.
The desire for a certain kind of affection, that is bittersweet because you are alone, and cannot adequately imagine believing in it.
Wanting desperately to change, but having some sense of peace with life's decisions for the few hours after you finish reading.
The contradiction of loving and hating a book, an author, a genre.
Buying a house with extra room for hope.
Willa, one of two main characters, tells the other "Happiness is a risk. If you're not a little scared, then you're not doing it right" (238).

There was a strange but universal understanding among women. On some level, all women know, they all understood, the fear of being outnumbered, of being helpless. It throbbed in their chests when they thought about the times they left stores and were followed. The knocks on their car windows as they were sitting alone at red lights, and strangers asking for rides. Having too much to drink and losing their ability to be forceful enough to just say no. Smiling at strange men coming on to them, not wanting to hurt their feelings, not wanting to make a scene. All women remembered these things, even if they had never happened to them personally. It was a part of their collective unconscious.

I like this quote because I agree with it wholeheartedly. I think that all women do have this radar, or they should. I tried to explain to one of my guy friends why I wouldn't walk around late at night by myself, and he didn't understand at all, but saying the same thing to a female friend, she didn't blink an eye.

This time the story was about a ghost, though the ghost didn't seem to be a particularly harmful one. He made people speak truths that they didn't want to say, but nothing else that seemed particularly malicious. I would have liked to have seen that explored more. The book could have been longer. There could have been more mystery. I feel like this time the secret came out too early and I didn't care enough about the old ladies to really mind that they killed someone. I did like that Claire showed up from Garden Spells, but I felt like that was more a pat on the head than necessary for the story.
It was a decent book, it just didn't seem as fleshed out and magical as the others have been.

Good Reading,
Caitlin