The Peach Seed

June 26, 2023
Jones debuts with a layered saga of a Southern Black family that weaves stories of the slave trade and the 1960s civil rights movement. In 1796 Senegal, six-year-old Malik Welé begins to learn his father’s woodcarving trade and dreams of one day sailing the Atlantic. His dream turns to a nightmare when he’s abducted by two Black men and enslaved in America at age 17. In a parallel narrative set in present-day Georgia, 70-year-old Fletcher Duke encounters his long-ago lover Altovise Benson in a grocery store. Back in 1962, Fletcher and Altovise were working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when they were separated and jailed during an altercation with police, and never managed to reunite. Previously, Fletcher had carved Altovise a monkey from a peach seed, just like the one his father gave him as a boy. Before Jones reveals the link between the Duke family’s monkey-carving tradition and Malik, a discovery that deepens Fletcher and Altovise’s connection in the present day, she shows how Fletcher trained in workshops to protect other activists from mob and police violence while Altovise learned from the original Freedom Singers how to recast church songs into protest anthems. It’s a lot to juggle, but Jones manages to tie together the themes of ancestral heritage and the persistent power of love. This is worth a look.

July 15, 2023
The sweeping story of a Black family in the South focuses on resilience and love. At almost 70, Fletcher Dukes still lives on the seven-acre farm outside Albany, Georgia, where he grew up. The farm has belonged to his people for generations, a point of pride for a Black family in the Deep South. He's content for the most part, although he misses his glory days as a young man active in the Civil Rights Movement--the same days in which he was in love with a girl named Altovise Benson. She left Albany long ago and became famous as a jazz singer; Fletcher stayed, made a happy marriage, and raised three daughters. He's been a widower for several years when he and his sister, Olga--who's still a busy political activist--go to the Piggly Wiggly for groceries one day. Fletcher recognizes her perfume before she even comes into sight: Altovise is back. The novel follows the story of Fletcher and Altovise forward and delves into their past while painting a warm portrait of his family and community. Some chapters leave Albany for Saginaw, Michigan, where a man named Siman Miller lives; others take the reader to the life of Malik Wel�, a teenager living near the Senegal River in West Africa a couple of centuries ago. Their connections to Fletcher eventually become clear, as does the significance of the peach seed of the book's title, a pit carved into the shape of a tiny monkey and handed down among the male members of the Dukes family. Dialogue varies from realistic and funny to some improbably lengthy monologues, but Jones is always insightful about family dynamics. And it's a pleasure to see older people as main characters in a novel, depicted fully and without condescension. Engaging characters keep a complex multigenerational plot moving to embody decades of Black history.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.