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Rating: Summary: Touching remembrance Review: A touching remembrance of a 1970s adolescence. Karr made me both want to go back to the innocence and exploration and made me so relieved to be independent and no longer affected on a daily basis by the disfunctioning parental bodies. Startlingly honest, Karr makes one feel the joys and pains of adolescence as if they were currently going through it. Recommended.
Rating: Summary: Sally the Siamese Cat Review: As a cat lover, my favorite passage in Mary Karr's novel Cherry is her description of how she dressed her Siamese cat Sally in her doll's clothes:
"The times I jammed that cat into lace pinafore, she'd never once bit or scratched me. Oh she'd struggle. I could feel her sinews tighten in my hand. Only once did she lose her temper though. When I'd tied her into my baby carriage with an elaborate web of Christmas ribbon, she managed to gnaw through her restraints and wound up under an azalea bush hissing in her white bonnet."
I did the same thing as a child, and this passage rings so true, as do all of Mary's descriptions of growing up too fast in the Sixties and Seventies. She is courageous to present her past so honestly, as many of us who grew up in that era often lie about our younger days! I am inspired by the fact that she was able to emerge from the wild background described in both her novels and write so compellingly about her life. I hope to see more from her in the book stores.
Rating: Summary: Great story-telling! I saw myself in her! Review: As a young woman I could relate to the many stories that Mary Karr bought to mind. The pressures of being a young girl and to be accepted. I noticed the reviews for this book were not the best, but I really think any young girl should give this a chance. This book is a good example of identifying ones self.the only part I was not real crazy about was that it had a whole section that concentrated on her drug life which wasnt easy for me to identify with. I really believe someone in their teens or middle twenties should consider this book
Rating: Summary: The summer you and Meredith reread Franny and Zooey together Review: I am so glad I thought of doing this or was compelled to do this or whatever. I have just finished reading this book and I felt so strongely that I had to do something, give it to the perfect person or leave it in the perfect spot so the perfect person would come along and scoop it up or send it across the country to my Meredith who no doubt read it already and will tell me so quite flatly apon it's arrival. If you were ever a girl, or wanted to understand one especially the akward, angry or teenage type here is your book. It is totally unlike my youth and is an exact description of it all at once.....I laughed...I cried....I read until 4am because the truth hurts. I may be a "young adult" now but the things that happen to you in that part of your life stay, what's the line--the first cut is the deepest. I do not doubt that if some day I am with child, the teenage type, I will hand it to them if only to remind them I might not be very cool now but once believe it or not we were all a flutter. And whatever it is I can't say to their face about how hard it will be and how fun and seemingly pointless it will all seem is in this book just far enough away to seem like a dumpy town fairy tale. Simply remembering the sheer hilarity and cruelty of your own youth will mezmerize you as Karr weaves around you the stories of hers.
Rating: Summary: you're there... Review: I pulled this book off the shelf of one of those "take one / leave one" paperback exchanges at the library...sinfully not leaving another book behind, which is a bad habit in and of itself. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get into it, the writing style is a little hard to meld with in the beginning. Mary Karr turns the tables on the reader and instead of using the pronoun "I" or even referring to herself in third person, she moves the main character, herself, around the playing field of her true story with the word "you." You fall in love with John Cleary in the last golden days before highschool, You struggle to find your drunken mother on the nights when she's just disappeared without a word, and You are the one who has the psychedelic acid trip to end all acid trips that makes you wonder how You survived at all.
Rating: Summary: Never read Liars Club but Ms. Karr is brillant! Review: I've never read Liars Club. In fact I'd never even heard of Mary Karr, I found Cherry in a discount book section at a safeway. I needed somthing to read, it had a colorful cover. I asked my mother to buy it. I am so thankful that my mother doesn't censor what I read or she would have exploded with in the second paragraph. I'm in awe at how Ms. Karr can say pu**y and f**** and loads of other crude language and still make it sound beautifuly poetic. The story itself moves along steadily and the only time I got even remotely bored was during the last two chapters. I found the drug enduced narration hard to follow, and it made me sleepy.
Rating: Summary: Tour de force Review: Picks up where The Liar's Club left off. Exquisite writing about Mary Karr's volatile, on-the-edge adolescence in a nowhere little town in Texas. Anyone who thinks kids in a small town can't get up to 'mischief' would do well to read Cherry. Karr is talented, brilliant, and challenged by her situation: the child of unreliable, often absent parents who blunder through life as if parenting were a game you can choose to play - or not. As a writer myself, I found Karr's use of the second person 'you' when referring to herself to be a stunningly successful ploy, a way of showing how adolescents distant themselves from their own lives even in speech and writing. Maturing out of childhood and directly into sexuality, Karr finds her salvation in books and language, but it obviously wasn't easy. Wonderful writing, scary story, great book.
Rating: Summary: Move over J.D. Salinger Review: This woman is about to take your place in her coming-of-age story that knocks the socks off any to date. After reading The Liar's Club, I was certain that Mary Karr would not be able to live up to the power and the raw passion of that first memoir. I was wrong. Cherry is a powerhouse of a book. From the best first chapter I've ever read to the ending which left me praying for another 276 pages, Karr has ripped open her life in front of her public and has exposed her soul. Each and every sentence in Cherry is enticing, delicious prose and some halt you in your tracks. It's a must read, and one that I suspect will become the next required reading for some lucky student.
Rating: Summary: A Remembrance Of Innocence Lost Review: What does Mary Karr have left to prove? She already wrote the definitive memoir of a child's life in an East Texas hellhole, "The Liars' Club," which as a first-person narrative remains better than anything I've ever come across. Why risk another trip to the well? Can you exceed expectations when so many of them, like mine, are off the charts? I'm in a funny position writing this, because I expected to come here and write about my disappointment with "Cherry," why it wasn't up to par with "Liars' Club." But reading all the one- and two-star reviews, some of which raise valid points, others of which are just all wet, I feel a little more protective about what I just read. No, it's not as involving as "Liars' Club." Karr isn't the passive youngster anymore, and she takes on a wider swath of her life, from just before sixth grade all the way up through high school, meaning there isn't the concentration of time that worked with "Liars' Club." Our narrator is changing this time, and quickly. More problematic, there is Karr's use of the second-person singular for the bulk of the book, describing her actions as if you are her. It doesn't work, feeling arch and odd instead of inclusive. Karr's budding sensibilities as a poet also come into play, with the help of a friend suspiciously named Meredith Bright, and you either will identify with their precocious conversations on absurdist theater or, like me, feel distanced by it. But it's her life, and she should tell it as it is. The best part of the book is its first third, with its account of elementary and junior high school life. Karr's sharp eye for detail and her fluidity with language, so stunning in "Liars' Club," doesn't fail her here. She recalls the posture of a picked-on classmate "till her whole body became a sort of living question mark, the punctuation with which she responded to every mean sentence we could construct." Then there's her fear when approached by a boy she likes: "Part of me is also crazily rewinding to play back my whole walk across the field, for surely I did some stupid thing. I wouldn't pick my nose or anything...but I could have been skipping or singing some goofy song under my breath." Later, she will find herself recruited to give this same boy a long leg massage, in a riotously funny passage in which she gets hot and bothered learning the critical distinction between gastrocs and hamstrings. While people here note the presence of drugs, in all fairness they don't show up for more than a hundred pages, and she doesn't exactly turn into Ozzy Osbourne. She smokes some joints, and tries a few other things, but seems a bit removed from the drug culture even as she writes about it. Actually, I was glad to have the drugs come into play, as it beat reading about her reading Howard Nemerov. She has sex, too, but is shier about describing that than I would have expected from "Liars' Club." Karr is a virtuoso at description, and tying up the loose ends of a disorderly life. She makes for exciting, vivid company. If you liked reading Stephen King's "The Body," or Russell Baker's "Growing Up," you will like "Cherry." Even if you didn't like "The Body" or "Growing Up," you will like "Cherry." But you will like "Liars' Club" so much more.
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