Scan barcode
A review by jenpaul13
The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker
4.0
With marriage seeming to spell doom for the women of the Chapel family, there may be one lone survivor of it all but there will be a cost in Sarai Walker’s The Cherry Robbers.
To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website: http://makinggoodstories.wordpress.com/.
The Chapel family produced six daughters, all heiresses to the firearm fortune, who lived in a Victorian home nicknamed the wedding cake. With a distant father focused on business matters and no apparent emotional connections and an aloof mother sensitive to the emotions and world around her, the girls primarily looked after themselves and most of them viewed marriage as a way out of their strange lives. Iris, the second youngest of the daughters was the only one to take their mother’s warning of impending doom seriously when the eldest daughter, Aster, was about to get married; after Aster’s mysterious death, Iris’s outlook on marriage and men was forever marred, and solidified further when death was tragically taking the sisters out one by one. Eventually, Iris escaped from this cursed life and became a well-known, reclusive artist, under the name of Sylvia Wren, but her tragic past as Iris comes back to haunt her when a journalist reaches out, hell-bent on chasing the story, and mystery, of Iris Chapel and her sisters.
With a well-crafted and eerie atmosphere drawing readers in and female characters who are fully realized, this novel captures your attention with relative ease and creates a palpable tension to maintain your interest in learning about the more intricate details of the tragic fate befalling the Chapel girls. The gothic ghost story aspect of the novel was present, and there were true moments of horror (particularly for contemporary readers) and questions raised regarding what was real, but didn’t feel like the focus as it paled in comparison with the extensive exploration of femininity, sexuality, feminism, and grief, which all played a major role in crafting Iris’s identity. Though I wasn’t sold on how the story was being framed when presented at the start, by the end when it was wrapping (most) everything up the narrative’s framing wound up being satisfying enough and demonstrated that knowing what’s to come and knowing the details that went in to creating that outcome are rather different things; the Chapel story and the Wren story, though interconnected could easily be separated and developed with both remaining nearly equally interesting.
*I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website: http://makinggoodstories.wordpress.com/.
The Chapel family produced six daughters, all heiresses to the firearm fortune, who lived in a Victorian home nicknamed the wedding cake. With a distant father focused on business matters and no apparent emotional connections and an aloof mother sensitive to the emotions and world around her, the girls primarily looked after themselves and most of them viewed marriage as a way out of their strange lives. Iris, the second youngest of the daughters was the only one to take their mother’s warning of impending doom seriously when the eldest daughter, Aster, was about to get married; after Aster’s mysterious death, Iris’s outlook on marriage and men was forever marred, and solidified further when death was tragically taking the sisters out one by one. Eventually, Iris escaped from this cursed life and became a well-known, reclusive artist, under the name of Sylvia Wren, but her tragic past as Iris comes back to haunt her when a journalist reaches out, hell-bent on chasing the story, and mystery, of Iris Chapel and her sisters.
With a well-crafted and eerie atmosphere drawing readers in and female characters who are fully realized, this novel captures your attention with relative ease and creates a palpable tension to maintain your interest in learning about the more intricate details of the tragic fate befalling the Chapel girls. The gothic ghost story aspect of the novel was present, and there were true moments of horror (particularly for contemporary readers) and questions raised regarding what was real, but didn’t feel like the focus as it paled in comparison with the extensive exploration of femininity, sexuality, feminism, and grief, which all played a major role in crafting Iris’s identity. Though I wasn’t sold on how the story was being framed when presented at the start, by the end when it was wrapping (most) everything up the narrative’s framing wound up being satisfying enough and demonstrated that knowing what’s to come and knowing the details that went in to creating that outcome are rather different things; the Chapel story and the Wren story, though interconnected could easily be separated and developed with both remaining nearly equally interesting.
*I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.