An exploration of intergenerational violence, toxic masculinity, maternal enabling, domestic violence, making excuses, and reasons why women don’t just leave, Sour Cherry seeks to ask what makes a man a monster, and how can we stop it from happening?

This book is fast-paced, a long and complicated story being conveyed from mother to child in the cramped confines of their home as they wait for help to come. They have limited time and the mother has so much to tell her young boy. It’s the story of all of the generations of men that have come before him, although she wants to conceal that fact from him. She just wants her boy to break the cycle. To not be like his father, or like any of the men of the line before him. So this story is told furtively, just between the two of them, along with the ghosts of the past. This adds a deliciously spooky appeal to both the storytelling and the overall story and a gothic feel with the claustrophobia and isolation. That isolation is echoed in the story the mother is telling, full of lonely, rotting, crumbling mansions and desperate, innumerable wives to the same line of violent men. 

This was so interesting I plowed right through it, even though I thought I might have a hard time with the writing style at first. I got over it quickly with the lovely prose and inventive story format. I came for the thought this would be weird girl lit but I stayed because it turned out to be sad girl lit with some ghost girl thrown in for good measure. 4⭐️

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. 

File Under: Folklore Retelling/Ghost Fiction/Gothic Fiction/Literary Fiction/Magical Realism