The Peach Pit

Erin Soderberg Downing's The Peach Pit is a family adventure for 8 year olds about a crumbling mansion, a deadline and three children who mean to pull it off.

What happens

Great Aunt Lucinda has decided to give the Peaches her house. Not sell. Give. It's a red brick mansion with seven bedrooms, servant staircases and an intercom, and eight-year-old Herb is quite sure it's haunted.

There are conditions, of course. The family have to move in and turn the place into a bed and breakfast by Thanksgiving. If they can't, it gets sold to a stranger.

That's a lot to ask of one dad and three children. The banisters wobble. Doorknobs come off in your hand. Aunt Lucinda calls the place a pit and Freddy likes the name so much he keeps it.

The three Peaches are good company and very different from one another. Lucy is the organiser who deep-cleans her room before she unpacks a single box. Freddy builds cardboard castles at camp and sees a whole mansion as the same job, only better. Herb collects pine cones and treats them like pets (they travel in towel-lined boxes).

Your reader gets each of them in turn, so you're never far from somebody noticing what the other two missed. Lucy finds a little hatch in the ceiling of her bedroom cupboard. What's on the other side of it is the best moment in the opening chapters and I'm not going to spoil it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The children's mum died of cancer two years ago and the book says so plainly, early on. It isn't a sad story, but that loss is the reason they're all trying so hard. Dad is seeing a therapist. The children have quietly been running the family since it happened.

For a child who has lost someone, that could be comforting or it could be close to the bone. You'll know which. If they simply like big old houses with hidden stairs and a job to be done, they'll be fine.

There's a fair amount of ghost talk too, mostly clanking pipes and portraits with watchful eyes. Herb takes it seriously, so a nervous reader might as well.

What to read next

If they want to know how this lot ended up selling pie out of a truck in the first place, When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Peach Pie is the summer before this one, and it's in the library too.