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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)
“Karr proves herself as fluent in evoking the common ground of adolescence as she did in limning her anomalous girlhood… As she did in The Liars’ Club, Ms. Karr combines a poet’s lyricism and a Texan’s down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift.” (New York Times) “A fully achieved, lyrically rendered memoir of a bright young girl’s coming of age in America in the seventies.” (New York Review of Books) “Stunning… 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. She can turn even the most mundane events into gorgeous prose.” (New York Times Book Review) “Funny, profane, eloquent… no one tells stories like Karr.” (USA Today) |
“The Liars’ Club left no doubt that Mary Karr could flat out write… the one question everyone had upon finishing her story was, could she do it again? Cherry lays that question to rest once and for all… It never lacks for those trademark Karr details, but it’s about all of us.” (Newsweek)
“Here, intact, is the smart, sassy, wickedly observant voice first met in The Liars’ Club, a voice that knows how to tell a story in a crackling vernacular that feels exactly true to its setting.” (Washington Post)
“Cherry delivers. Karr still has her delicious knack for making you guffaw through horrible events… its humor, warmth, and crackling language should keep Karr’s fans hungering for another round.” (People)
“It’s the powerful spiked punch of Karr’s writing that amazes… Cherry is about the dizzy funk of female teen sexuality, and Karr captures the innocence and dirt of it, the hunger and the thrill, with exquisite pitch. Karr’s connection to her younger sexual self is profound without mercy or nostalgia… Karr identifies the vulnerable, frightening gap between most girls’ night thoughts and those in the day… Right now, in this remembrance of blooming, Karr continues to set the literary standard for making the personal universal.” (Entertainment Weekly)
“Step aside, J. D. Salinger, and take your alter ego Holden Caulfield with you. Mary Karr has staked out your turf, the upended land of adolescence. And she is just smart, angry, sensitive and self-mocking enough to defend it with everything she’s got.” (Chicago Sun Times)
“Here, intact, is the smart, sassy, wickedly observant voice first met in The Liars’ Club, a voice that knows how to tell a story in a crackling vernacular that feels exactly true to its setting.” (Washington Post)
“Cherry delivers. Karr still has her delicious knack for making you guffaw through horrible events… its humor, warmth, and crackling language should keep Karr’s fans hungering for another round.” (People)
“It’s the powerful spiked punch of Karr’s writing that amazes… Cherry is about the dizzy funk of female teen sexuality, and Karr captures the innocence and dirt of it, the hunger and the thrill, with exquisite pitch. Karr’s connection to her younger sexual self is profound without mercy or nostalgia… Karr identifies the vulnerable, frightening gap between most girls’ night thoughts and those in the day… Right now, in this remembrance of blooming, Karr continues to set the literary standard for making the personal universal.” (Entertainment Weekly)
“Step aside, J. D. Salinger, and take your alter ego Holden Caulfield with you. Mary Karr has staked out your turf, the upended land of adolescence. And she is just smart, angry, sensitive and self-mocking enough to defend it with everything she’s got.” (Chicago Sun Times)
An Excerpt
No road offers more mystery than the first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars--bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.
It's best if you set out on this quest with friends equally young, because then all of you will be carried through several days' sleepless drive and infrequent pee-stops across massive scorched desert by a collective hallucinogenic insomnia that turns the gigantic cacti into (alternately) first a guitar-toting mystic and then a phantom hitchhiker and finally into a spangled matador cutting veronicas above the sand floor. You will be carried past these metaphorical monsters by the fire and wonder of your collective yearning toward your chosen spot, the black dot on the map at which your young-muscled bodies will be fired. In this case, Los Angeles.
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No road offers more mystery than the first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars--bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.
It's best if you set out on this quest with friends equally young, because then all of you will be carried through several days' sleepless drive and infrequent pee-stops across massive scorched desert by a collective hallucinogenic insomnia that turns the gigantic cacti into (alternately) first a guitar-toting mystic and then a phantom hitchhiker and finally into a spangled matador cutting veronicas above the sand floor. You will be carried past these metaphorical monsters by the fire and wonder of your collective yearning toward your chosen spot, the black dot on the map at which your young-muscled bodies will be fired. In this case, Los Angeles.
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