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: Mary Karr is a Master of Linguistics
Review: This woman is amazing! I've never been disappointed in a book that written by someone who's primarily a poet. Somehow they seem to be able to dig even deeper and describe even more richly the person, place, and or thing they're describing. Here it's her coming of age as a young teenage girl. The quest for acceptance, the awakening of sexual desire, and the discovery of the world of recreational pharmaceutics. You don't have to have read "The Liar's Club" to understand or appreciate this book. It stands on it's own merits, a richly detailed world of adolecent minutiae.The book moves quite nicely until almost the end, where my interest lagged slightly which is the only reason I didn't give it five stars. Yet for technical aspects, and her ability to evoke feeling and emotion it should probably get a whopping ten.
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.
| 
