Member Review
Review by
Lilibet B, Reviewer
“Against the haystack a girl stands laughing at me,
Cherries hung round her ears.
Offers me her scarlet fruit: I will see
If she has any tears.” - D. H. Lawrence
Sarai Walker says in the acknowledgements for “The Cherry Robbers” that the poem “Cherry Robbers” (from which this stanza comes from), was the main inspiration for what became the tale of the Chapel sisters and their untimely deaths. Other inspirations were, of course, Sarah Winchester (of the Winchester Rifle fortune and the now-infamous San Jose tourist attraction that used to be her home) and Georgia O-Keefe (famous artist known to most for painting portraits of flowers that also greatly resembled biological female genitalia).
To me, the book also has a sort of claustrophobic, humid feel that I associate with the movie “The Virgin Suicides”, a dreamy sense of females set apart in their own world I associate with the movie “Heavenly Creatures”, and, of course, (as even the books points out), that sense of intense sisterly push-and-pull dynamics that comes with having a gaggle of daughters that’s so familiar from “Pride and Prejudice”. There’s also intense themes running through the whole book about the loss of identity for the wife that comes with marriage and childbirth, the common phenomena (that persists to this day) of not listening to women when they speak their truths or sometimes even just when they speak, of men always thinking they know better than women, about women not feeling complete without marriage and children and the social pressure that tells them they are less without these things, and about how women who are in any way different will always be looked at askance by society. Some of the rest of it, well, it’s going to be left up to the reader to interpret. Violence, intercourse, innocence, and death. These four things are all intrinsically tied together in this novel, and how you interpret the connection will go a long way into how you view this whole novel and how it will feel to you at the end.
For me, this was a page-turner. I couldn’t put it down. It’s exactly the type of gothic, haunted house, psychological family drama I like to devour in one piece. I knew where it was going, but that was absolutely okay with me, because like the protagonist, I faced it with a sense of staid inevitability. As she told the story and expunged her demons, I cried for her and her sisters and her mother and for myself, in a way. If I had been alive in the 1950s I’d probably have been in a sanitarium. I’m not exactly what they call stable, and some of the prescriptions I take hadn’t even been invented back then.
It’s dramatic, it’s riveting, it’s horrific, and it’s absolutely worth reading.
Thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for early access to this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Cherries hung round her ears.
Offers me her scarlet fruit: I will see
If she has any tears.” - D. H. Lawrence
Sarai Walker says in the acknowledgements for “The Cherry Robbers” that the poem “Cherry Robbers” (from which this stanza comes from), was the main inspiration for what became the tale of the Chapel sisters and their untimely deaths. Other inspirations were, of course, Sarah Winchester (of the Winchester Rifle fortune and the now-infamous San Jose tourist attraction that used to be her home) and Georgia O-Keefe (famous artist known to most for painting portraits of flowers that also greatly resembled biological female genitalia).
To me, the book also has a sort of claustrophobic, humid feel that I associate with the movie “The Virgin Suicides”, a dreamy sense of females set apart in their own world I associate with the movie “Heavenly Creatures”, and, of course, (as even the books points out), that sense of intense sisterly push-and-pull dynamics that comes with having a gaggle of daughters that’s so familiar from “Pride and Prejudice”. There’s also intense themes running through the whole book about the loss of identity for the wife that comes with marriage and childbirth, the common phenomena (that persists to this day) of not listening to women when they speak their truths or sometimes even just when they speak, of men always thinking they know better than women, about women not feeling complete without marriage and children and the social pressure that tells them they are less without these things, and about how women who are in any way different will always be looked at askance by society. Some of the rest of it, well, it’s going to be left up to the reader to interpret. Violence, intercourse, innocence, and death. These four things are all intrinsically tied together in this novel, and how you interpret the connection will go a long way into how you view this whole novel and how it will feel to you at the end.
For me, this was a page-turner. I couldn’t put it down. It’s exactly the type of gothic, haunted house, psychological family drama I like to devour in one piece. I knew where it was going, but that was absolutely okay with me, because like the protagonist, I faced it with a sense of staid inevitability. As she told the story and expunged her demons, I cried for her and her sisters and her mother and for myself, in a way. If I had been alive in the 1950s I’d probably have been in a sanitarium. I’m not exactly what they call stable, and some of the prescriptions I take hadn’t even been invented back then.
It’s dramatic, it’s riveting, it’s horrific, and it’s absolutely worth reading.
Thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for early access to this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
