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: A Joyless Memoir
Review: First of all, let me echo other reviewers in saying not to expect anything like The Liar's Club. Mary Karr is still an enormously gifted writer, but while The Liar's Club had it moments of joy interspersed with various traumas, Cherry is just plain dank. Mary's exploits as a child weren't hopeless -- she had a resiliancy about her that assured the reader that she'd be all right, or some version thereof, in the end. The adolescent Mary descends deeper and deeper into a darkness that she manufactures for herself with the help of a pharmacy's worth of drugs and a heapin' helping of teen angst thrown in for good measure. I found it extremely interesting that Karr resorted to telling her story in second person in the last part, in which her relationship with drugs begins. I wondered to myself as I was reading whether she was using the second person narrative as a way of distancing herself from her high school self. In any case, the book is a much more difficult read than The Liar's Club, and I would definitely recommend that book before dipping your toes into this one. The reader emerges thoroughly saddened by Karr's own outright and between-the-lines admissions of her mistakes. I found her relationships with people especially dismaying -- but perhaps that was simply the way she chose to tell the story. The adolescent Karr is far from the precocious child of The Liar's Club. Her story is told from the bottom of an abyss -- I read an interview with Karr where she said that while writing Cherry, she would write for an hour and a half and then just collapse on the floor and fall asleep from exhaustion. I don't doubt it. A difficult yet rewarding 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: Cherry Not What I Hoped For
Review: I read Liar's Club for a book club and I loved it. It was funny, gripping, and gritty. I truly enjoyed the way she told her story, the good, the bad, and the ugly of her childhood. I was so thrilled to see that she had a second book published. But upon reading it I was highly disappointed. I was never able to get into it - it did not have the same powerful grasp of story that the first book did. I found that I had to keep working at reading it, rather than wanting to read it! I did not like the secodn person style she took in writing this book. It wasn't the content of the book that disappointed me, it was the way she told it to us that did. I will read what comes next from Mary Karr because I believe she has a great "eye" for the world she sees, this book will not deter me from reading more from her because I thought the Liar's Club was one of the best books I have read in years. It is just that Cherry is not....
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: Angst of adolescence with a hard-edged sense of humor
Review: Mary Karr is a fine writer. When I read her memoir, "The Liar's
Club" about her rough and tumble childhood in a working class
Texas town, I loved every word. That's why I was so anxious to read
this sequel, which deals with her adolescence. There are definitely
some differences between the two books, but I wasn't
disappointed. The voice of the young Mary Karr comes through loud
and clear. It's honest and foul-mouthed and disrespectful. It's a
sharp-tongued blade that dares to illuminate the angst of adolescence
with a hard-edged sense of humor. And yet it brings the bittersweet
sadness of disappointments and awakenings to the page. The reader
cannot help but love her. This book tells her story from age 11
through 17. It's about her friendships and boyfriends and coming of
age. As it takes place in the 1970s, there are a lot of drugs. Mary
is sent to the principal's office for not wearing a bra. Mary hangs
out with long-haired surfers and does drugs. Mary gets arrested.
Mary's sister takes a different path than Mary. In this book, Mary's
parents take a back seat to the peer group. The story of their
tumultuous marriage, psychological breakdowns and heavy drinking has
been explored in "The Liar's Club". By this book their
eccentricities and foibles are already accepted as givens. Again,
their love shines through. I'm glad that Ms. Karr decided to
continue her story. It might have been a little more episodic than
the first book and the events not as traumatic. But the strength of
her writing is not in the events, but in her view of them. And that
is why I enjoyed this book so much. The book ends when Mary is 17.
Hopefully, they'll be yet another book that will follow her through
the years.
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.
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