The Grove

In the early 1960s, in the red clay country of rural Central Florida, two sisters—Pip and Sissy—are trying to hold their family together. The orange groves that once sustained them are fading. Their father is absent. The world beyond their dirt road is beginning to change in ways they can feel but not yet name.

When a traveling carnival arrives and makes camp at the edge of town, everything shifts. New people. New possibilities. A first love that arrives like a season and changes the landscape of everything that follows.

“With love, you need the sour to savor the sweet.”

Though categorized as young adult fiction, The Grove was not written for any particular audience. Brooks Whitney Phillips wrote the story she needed to tell. Its themes—sisterhood, resilience, race and class, the cost of hope—belong to every reader who has ever loved a place that no longer exists.