Rest in Peaches by Alex Brown: Review by Alex Brown
Rest in Peaches, Alex Brown (Page Street YA 979-8-89003-070-2, $18.99, 336pp, hc) October 2024.
Get ready for another great young adult horror comedy with Rest in Peaches by Alex Brown (not me!). Quinn is about to do the biggest, most important thing she’s ever done in her whole 17 years of life. At this year’s Homecoming game, she will don a brand new Peaches the Parrot mascot costume and entertain a huge crowd of spectators (and college recruiters). She’s been the mascot for a few years now, but no one knows it’s her under all that felt. Until, that is, when her Homecoming performance is ruined by sabotage. Her identity is exposed, her reputation is ruined, and the real Peaches the Parrot is birdnapped by an unknown assailant.
Tessa, meanwhile, wants nothing more than to figure out what she actually wants. Her boyfriend, perfect, handsome Emerson, seems to want more out of their relationship than she’s willing to give, and her mom, perfect, beautiful Camille, has a relentless drive for success Tessa never manages to meet. When people connected to Quinn and Tessa wind up murdered, all eyes turn to the two girls. They’re each connected to the murder victims. Tessa keeps accidentally (or ‘‘accidentally’’?) stumbling onto the bodies, and the killer is wearing Quinn’s old Peaches costume. With the help of Quinn’s true crime podcaster ex-girlfriend, the girls set out to uncover the killer before anyone else gets stabbed. Unfortunately for them, the killer has eyes everywhere, a seemingly endless supply of sharp knives, and a thirst for revenge that cannot be quenched.
If Damned If You Do, Brown’s young adult debut, is riding first class on the Buffy train, then Rest in Peaches is a nonstop ticket to Scream-ville. The cover copy and marketing don’t indicate just how much Rest in Peaches wink-wink nudge-nudges Scream, but it’s a lot. Like with Damned If You Do, Rest in Peaches is more like a loving homage than a direct parallel. The big plot points line up, as do several of the twists, but there are enough major and minor divergences that it doesn’t feel like a rip-off.
And Rest in Peaches hits all the marks of the ’90s-’00s teen slasher subgenre. It’s campy and silly – I mean, come on, the Big Bad is someone wearing a school mascot costume of a colorful parrot – yet bloody and scary. Brown doesn’t pull back on describing the violence, but she also keeps it from feeling too terrifying or grotesque. She keeps the reader on edge and heart pumping but not ready to crawl out of their skin.
Brown also digs into some deeper themes a lot of people miss in Scream. At the end of the day, Scream is about the violence young men are encouraged by society to commit. One of the killers is a boy who’s mad his parents got divorced, and the other is mad that his girlfriend dumped him. These are two privileged dudes growing up in a privileged town populated by middle- and upper-class privileged people with manicured lawns and well-funded public schools. They want for nothing, but the moment a woman slightly inconveniences them, they have to make it everyone else’s problem.
Brown explores those same themes of white privilege, the patriarchy, and toxic masculinity while also adding onto them layers of queerness, race, gender, and parental pressure. It takes a lot of skill to do what Brown is doing here within the confines of a teen slasher, a subgenre often defined by its abuse of young women. She isn’t so much dismantling the subgenre as reimagining what it could be capable of. It’s why I love seeing marginalized authors take on well-worn tropes and infusing their cultures and experiences into it. A trope is altered by the author who writes it, and when you fold in larger sociocultural contexts, the results are often dazzling.
Two quick notes. I mentioned it above, but I want to be clear that no, I did not review my own book. We are different Alex Browns. Also, I did not know this before I asked to cover this book, but Alex gave me a very generous shout-out in the acknowledgements. We’ve never had the pleasure of meeting IRL, but I did write a glowing review of Damned If You Do. So go check that book out and this one and you’ll have a damn good time.
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Alex Brown is a librarian, author, historian, and Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, young adult fiction, librarianship, and Black history.
This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus.
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