The Cherry Robbers is the Book Everyone SHOULD Be Talking About

I'm genuinely not sure where I heard about The Cherry Robbers [Sarai Walker]. 

In my head, I assumed some BookTuber had mentioned it and I have a vague recollection of adding it to my wishlist, in a half-hearted 'probably never get around to it' way. People were talking about it, I assumed, which is why I knew the cover well enough to pick it up while dashing through an entire warehouse of books. 

It's only as I finished it and breathlessly looked around to see other people's thoughts that I discovered... no one is talking about it. A big queer gothic novel with literary elements and a gorgeous cover and there are (at time of writing) maybe three mentions of it on YouTube? I honestly feel gaslighted. 

As such, you probably don't know the premise of this book, which is a queer coming of age story set in the fifties. Sylvia, an elderly, reclusive artist, deals with the unwelcome resurfacing of a life she has long forgotten - when she called Iris, and was one of six heiresses to a gun fortune. 

The girls live like unsocialised princesses in the tower, with their father distant and their mother troubled by the gun-victim ghosts she claims to haunted by. All six see marriage as their only way out into the world, and one-by-one they start to marry, only to almost immediately die. As the younger sisters begin to fear marriage, they attempt to escape in other ways... yet their attempts also end in death. It's a sensuous, gothic novel, slipping into genuine horror at a few points. 

The mystery is never fully resolved, but it's not something that requires resolving. Perhaps the sisters truly have a cursed bloodline, or this is a collective punishment for their family's weapon manufacturing, or maybe it's a form of mass hysteria... it doesn't really matter. It's a metaphor for the death of the girl once she goes out into the world - either giving herself over to a man, or having to squeeze into society's requirements. 

It's not as simple as loss of virginity - though it seems that way at first - for two of the sisters have no interest in men, yet are still killed/nearly killed during their attempts to escape their oppressive house. It's only when Iris flees with a new identity (but a determination to be her true self) that she manages to get away. 

There is some heavy-handedness, especially the father's character who feels like a '1950's father' cardboard cut-out at times; he's work-obsessed, distant, relatively generous to his children, and while not outright cruel, is not interested in wife's mental health problems. There are hints of him cutting a sad figure - his sheer awkwardness at an informal barbeque, a millionaire who digs each of his daughter's graves himself - but Iris has minimal sympathy for him, and even less interest. 

The other men in the book are equally brushed aside, surface-level nice, quietly cruel, and all equally threatening to Iris's world. They are all dangerous, controlling, and ultimately useless in Iris's eyes, with features described in the alien way only a teenage girl with no interest in men could.  

Iris is devoted to her mother, whom she refers to as 'Belinda', since Belinda was a person and not just a mother. Iris is the only one with any time for her, as Belinda's distance, superstition, and inability to even fake normal social behaviour has driven her other daughters away. Her instance that something terrible will happen if Aster - the eldest - goes through with her wedding is the final straw for the family, as the sisters' mockery of their mother turns to anger. But Iris believes her, only becoming more convinced when the 'bad thing' does indeed come to pass. 

Yet, Iris cannot truly understand her mother - her sisters' little world is the only one she will ever truly fit into. Even the life she eventually builds doesn't belong to Iris, but to her new self - Sylvia, who has buried her memories and even buried her possessions. Like all of the others, Iris had to die to escape. 

For me, I understood this book without truly understanding it. Finishing it felt like completing a large feast, with the knowledge that there would be considerable work to digest it ahead. Just like Iris's lessons on abstract art, so much of the book is a feeling - dread, grief, yearning - that it's hard to put opinions into words. 

In the time since writing this, but before publishing it, The Cherry Robbers has gone on sale a few times. So maybe I won't be the only one talking about it soon. 

 

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