The Grove

May 1, 2025
Grades 8-11 Two sisters navigate poverty and parental neglect on an orange grove in 1960s Florida. Pip, 15, is the novel's sensitive, naive narrator who escapes by writing stories. Sissy, 17, pores over fashion magazines. Their father is a fourth-generation grove man; he can imagine no other life, even though his wife despises Juicy Acres. Every day brings hard work, and the sisters are "white trash" outcasts at school. When the circus comes to town, Sissy is seduced and then discarded by a dashing sword-swallower. She becomes distant and mean, so Pip turns to Silas for companionship. Silas, a sweet, hardworking orphan, was abandoned in the grove as a young boy. He shares Pip's deep affinity for the natural world. Today's teens are unlikely to be surprised that Sissy is hiding a pregnancy, and the novel's climax, a great injustice, is perpetrated by a clich�d villain. Still, readers may be swept up in the spare, beautiful writing, subtle brushstrokes depicting lives of isolation and despair with pinpoint accuracy, and a love between two young people too pure for this world.

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May 15, 2025
In this debut, a troubled family history plays out in a dilapidated Florida orange grove. It's the early 1960s in rural Belleville. Fifteen-year-old Penelope "Pip" Bean, and her 17-year-old sister, Cecelia, who goes by Sissy, spend their weekdays in a one-room high school and their weekends at Juicy Acres, their family business, selling orange juice by the side of the road. They try to avoid their parents, who drink too much and get into vicious arguments. When Raffy, a sword-swallowing Lothario, arrives with the annual Christmastime carnival, Sissy is smitten--and hopeful that she's found a way out of town. Pip sees them having sex, and Sissy declares she's in love. But after she runs away to join him, Sissy discovers Raffy has left without her. Despairing, she withdraws into anger that shatters their sisterly bond, leaving Pip adrift. The orange-grove setting and the desolate life of isolated, impoverished Florida farmers are well-delineated. Most characters, particularly Pip's parents, are drawn with nuance, although longtime orange grove fruit picker Silas, who's illiterate and from an even more deprived background, veers close to caricature. Some plot points strain credulity, particularly as the story advances, and the abruptly hopeful ending, while something of a relief, doesn't feel entirely realistic. Main characters present white. Melodramatic and bleak with a strong sense of place, but uneven in execution.(Historical fiction. 14-18)

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Starred review from June 1, 2025

Gr 9 Up-Phillips's YA debut is a triumph in historical fiction. Pip, 15, and Sissy, 17, are as close as they can be as sisters and best friends. Sheltered, the two of them have created a symbiotic existence, surviving despite the desperate, hardscrabble circumstances of their farm life, living on an orange grove in a small Florida town in 1960 with their abusive father and alcoholic, clueless mother. The sisters are excited when a traveling carnival comes to town, where Sissy meets a slick carnival worker who lures her away from Pip and subsequently changes their lives forever. As Sissy's personality and their relationship change for the worse, Pip turns to Silas, the hired hand who lives on their farm, for friendship and support. Phillips's writing is vivid and thoughtful as she tackles the bonds of sisterhood and first love, poverty, and socioeconomic bigotry, producing fully formed characters and leaving no question of motivation or actions in their wake. Most characters present as white. This sits solidly next to books by Ruta Sepetys and could be likened to Delia Owens's Where the Crawdads Sing. VERDICT A must-have for all collections.-Kim Gardner

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