Sour Cherry spins a Bluebeard story as a mother turns tragedy into fairy tale for her child. The writing is lush and hypnotic, weaving a darkly atmospheric tale of a soil-scented lord whose touch turns wives to ghosts, creating the dreamy unease of a gothic fairy tale. The story's heart lies in Tristan, the lord's gentle son, whose chapters offer a haunting counterpoint to his father's violence

This is exactly what I want from fairytale retellings. It engages with the shifting narratives, the threat and safety inherent in the stories we tell. It was romantic in the older definition of the term, intense and atmospheric, the characters wrestling with threats both human and much larger than themselves. It was gorgeous and strange and timeless, lush in a way that steps in like with Kelly Link and Angela Carter. I want to shove it into the hands of everyone I know, and I want to clutch it to my chest and cherish it like a forbidden secret.

I CANNOT say enough about how much I adored this book. The layered storytelling with the most vivid imagery (either the most beautiful, or disgusting images) takes you through all of these stories. I feel like I could smell the scenes I was reading through, it was so immersive. The subject of cycles of abuse, generational trauma, can't always be done in a way that is so subtle, yet you can feel the tension in your neck knowing that you can never really outrun where you came from. Sour Cherry will DEFINITELY be in my top books of 2025, and it's only January. Ready to sign on as a lifetime Theodoridou fan if this is what a debut novel looks like for them.

A lush and rich modern fairy tale with more secrets and crannies than you can count. Lyrical, haunting, and utterly new, while recalling our most dangerous stories and warnings.

I have been reading fairy tales retold since before I was old enough to want more than what was offered by the original telling. I know the cadence, the violence, and the shape of these tales as well as my own heartbeat or body, fed as I have been on them for decades, which is how I know Natalia Theodoridou is doing something new and extraordinary with “Sour Cherry.”

Comparisons to Angela Carter have and will continue to be made, but I think a likening to Daniel M. Lavery’s “The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror” or Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her Body & Other Parties” are more apt for this novel. Like the stories in these collections, Theodoridou’s “Sour Cherry” uses the bones of fairy tales as structure, but builds beyond the classic confines of gender, “once upon a time” time periods or clever postmodernism. The result: a far more fantastical beast.

I’d go so far as to say—don’t @ me—that Theodoridou makes the original Bluebeard retellings, those by Carter and Atwood and others, that electrified me with their subversion in my youth, feel almost archaic. To read this novel is to feel seen and to be haunted by it. The prose is achingly lovely in the way of fairy tales, but the tragedy at its core—the way its truth is woven through the plant lore and hearth magic and stories within the story—feels fresh and urgent and entirely now.

What makes this novel so different and effective is how Theodoridou has managed to take the cycle of domestic abuse and realize its devastation on a scale that can be understood by anyone, even those who sneer or sigh or condescend and ask that age old, awful question: “why didn’t she just leave?” Dear reader, “Sour Cherry” will tell you in the voices of the old tales and red-mouthed ghosts and birds that sing with the voices of women why she did not leave. I read this novel with my heart in my throat. I thought of my mother and my grandmother and countless other women I have loved and grieved with and I cried and felt vengeful and seen and wanted to break things with my hands. “Sour Cherry” is a triumph.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tin House for an ARC in exchange for an honest review of what’s set to be one of my favorite books of 2025.