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Overview
From Mary Karr comes this gorgeously written, often hilarious story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age. Picking up where the bestselling The Liars' Club left off, Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms and hooks up with an unforgettable band of heads and bona-fide geniuses. Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter. Karr assembles a self from the smokiest beginnings, delivering a long- awaited sequel that is both "bawdy and wise" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter. Karr assembles a self from the smokiest beginnings, delivering a long- awaited sequel that is both "bawdy and wise" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Synopsis
Picking up where the bestselling The Liars' Club left off, Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms and hooks up with an unforgettable band of heads and bona-fide geniuses. Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter.
Bust Magazine
Karr is a stunning poet, and this work only proves that further. Her adolescent suicide attempt is rendered painfully, beautifully, poignantly and not without some humor....Regardless of your circumstances, you will nod your head repeatedly as insight upon insight strikes home.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
When Mary Karr began the mid-'90s memoir craze with The Liars' Club, she introduced us to a scrappy, funny kid with a fierce intelligence, a ruthless curiosity, and an indelible stripe of defiance. In Cherry, that kid -- still called Pokey by her father -- is older and wilder, inching closer and closer to trouble with every paragraph.
The book opens with Mary's farewell to her father as she prepares to leave for L.A. as a teenager with little more than a hundred dollars, a newfound taste for drugs, and a single-minded determination to leave the dusty town of Leechfield, Texas where she grew up. While her mother pages through an art book in the kitchen and disinterestedly encourages her to go, her father offers her breakfast, then forbids her to leave: "You need to stay right here at forty-nine-oh-one Garfield. California's ass."
This moment distills Karr's childhood and adolescence nicely, describing the benign inattention of her mother that shaped her independence and her father's tenderness and befuddlement in the face of it. Karr's defiance is coupled, even as a child, with a stubborn refusal of all pity, but Karr's talent is such that we see young Mary's charm and vulnerability through her toughness. Cherry chronicles many such moments, from Mary's defiant topless bicycle ride through the neighborhood to her near-expulsion from high school for failing to wear the proper undergarments.
In fact, Mary's school years are a rich lode of both pathos and humor. When she's hauled to the principal's office (in just one of many visits) for questioning the need to study algebra, he tells her sternly, "I assure you. Without math, you'll wind up being no more than a common prostitute." Mary knows, however, that she wants to be a poet, and no amount of math will stop her. In high school, she finally meets someone smarter than she is, as enraptured by literature and as stifled by Leechfield as she is. Karr's descriptions of this friendship are richly satisfying, since we've been hoping from the beginning of Cherry for Mary to find a companion worthy of her gritty tenderness.
By the end of Cherry, we know Mary's headed for trouble in some way, and everyone else seems to know it, too -- even her mother, who blithely encourages her to experiment sexually and charms a judge out of punishing Mary for drug possession. But for Karr, the choice between trouble in the big wide world and trouble at home in Leechfield seems an obvious one. Like her parents, by the end of Cherry we're both rooting for her as she slams the screen door behind her and wishing she'd never leave.
--Julie Robichaux
Bust Magazine
Karr is a stunning poet, and this work only proves that further. Her adolescent suicide attempt is rendered painfully, beautifully, poignantly and not without some humor....Regardless of your circumstances, you will nod your head repeatedly as insight upon insight strikes home.Tucson Weekly
Readers familiar with The Liar's Club...will welcome back the enchanting voice of Mary Karr.From The Critics
When The Liars' Club hit bookstores in 1995, Karr blew the top off the memoir genre. Now she's back with Cherry, a chronicle of her adolescence in Leechfield, Texas. Even if the stories of Karr's youth in The Liars' Club weren't terribly interesting, her use of language was enough to keep the reader happy. But compared to that previous work, these tales of drug trips and adolescent angst can get somewhat tedious. Charlie and Pete, Karr's mother and father, are the most compelling characters, as they were in The Liars' Club. Their lives provide the book with its richest material, perhaps because they have been strengthened by hardship. Karr's hard-drinking, refinery worker father reveals a hidden tenderness and her mother displays steely strength, particularly when defending and standing by her children. Neither a drug arrest nor the midnight discovery of a naked, watermelon-eating daughter shakes Charlie's profound belief that Karr has the power to survive and shape her own life. Cherry doesn't deliver the goods in the same way that The Liars' Club did, but that may be due to the fact that an adolescent character is anchoring the narrative. Karr does, however, capture many essential coming-of-age moments with brave clarity and honesty, allowing for a long, hard look at both the beauty and the ugliness of growing up.—Erin Doyle
Publishers Weekly
Readers seduced by Karr's canny memoir of a childhood spent under the spell of a volatile, defiantly loving family in The Liar's Club can look forward to more exquisite writing in this sequel focusing on her adolescence in a dusty Texas town. Karr struggles as the talented child of a sullen, dismissive father and an ethereal, unstable mother who studies art and disappears from time to time, functioning more as an ally than as a mother to young Mary, whom she encourages to be sexually active. When Mary is locked up in a drug raid, her mother rescues her by charming the judge, an old admirer. Writing in the second person, Karr recounts with disarming immediacy her tenuous childhood friendships, her rocky move into adolescence and sexual experimentation (she describes teenage kisses as "delicate as origami in their folds and bendings"); her troubles with school authority and her early escape into books and language. In one funny and poignant episode, Mary despairs over her dysfunctional family life in a dull town and, influenced by the literature she is reading, makes a halfhearted attempt at suicide, before she resolves to live "as long as there are plums to eat and somebody--anybody who gives enough of a damn to haul them for you." Moving effortlessly from breathtaking to heart stabbing to laugh out loud raucous, the precision and sheer beauty of Karr's writing remains astounding. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|KLIATT
To quote KLIATT's Sept. 2001 review of the Books on Tape audiobook edition: Mary Karr grew up in the '60s and '70s as a smart girl in Texas. She struggled to find her way in a world where rules seemed to be made just to thwart her and where the messages she received from her parents, school and friends all loudly clashed in her head. In adolescence, she, like many of her peers, turned to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. In school some teachers recognized her brilliance and others only saw her arrogance and violations of the dress code... Though this volume ends with Mary very confused, this autobiography by a successful author, professor and parent will resonate with young women and their mothers. (Editor's note: this is a sequel to The Liar's Club, Karr's best-selling memoir about her childhood.) Category: Biography & Personal Narrative. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Penguin, 278p., Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Nola Theiss; Sanibel, FLSara Mosle
... if The Liars' Club succeeded partly because of its riveting particularity, Cherry succeeds because of its universality. The first book is about one harrowing childhood, the second about every adolescence. Karr's talent doesn't depend on the specifics of her autobiography. She can turn even the most mundane events -- a first kiss, an altercation with a school principal -- into gorgeous prose.—New York Times Book Review
Adam Begley
....the writing in Cherry is terrific. Mary Karr's high-low maneuvers are worthy of an Olympic acrobat: She stoops for the meanest vulgarity, hitches it to lofty art.New York Observer
Michiko Kakutani
Karr proves herself as fluent in evoking the common ground of adolescence as she did in limning her anomalous girlhood.As she did in Liars' Club, Ms. Karr combines a poet's lyricism and a Texan's down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift. Some of her stories are nostalgic for a vanished time and place; some are scathing in their evocation of an insular world; some are just plain funny.—New York Times
Liz Marlantes
...it's a tribute to Karr's power as a storyteller that this account, even with past and future installments hanging over it, is a tremendously enjoyable read on its own, Karr has a warm and inventive writing style, and her memoir is sprinkled throughout with penetrating insights. She's the kind of author you wish you knew in person, and she leaves readers in eager anticipation of her move to adulthood.—Christian Science Monitor