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: 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: 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: iconoclastic, defiant and gritty teen discerns true self
Review: Both the cover and title of Mary Karr's second memoir, "Cherry," are deceptive. Although her scathingly witty and powerfully realized descriptions of coming-of-age in the environmentally and spiritually polluted town of Leechfield, Texas, during the late 1960s and early 70s treat her sexual awakening, her memoir is much more a sarcastic, self-deprecating, but liberating analysis of how Mary came to understand her essence. Her knowledge of what she would come to refer to as her "Same Self" is hard earned, the author having travelled through the seas of family dysfunction, alienation and rejection of her social mileu, and a bizarre and frightening absorbtion into the drug-culture and the nascent counterculture of her adolescence. Ms. Karr is an exquisite writer; the compelling narrative of her life augments the marvelous capturing of Texan patois and the absolutely captivating characterizations she renders of the men, women and children who help provide defintion to her life. Now a professor of English at Syracuse University, Mary Karr was a hellion as a child and a rebel as a teenager. Resentful of the restrictions imposed upon her by a town dedicated to spewing toxic waste into the atmosphere and reared by an alcoholic father and a desperately brilliant but fiercely independent mother, Mary determines not to follow the footsteps of her voluptuous (and right wing) older sister. At eleven, envious of her boyfriends' freedom and captivated by her initial sexual stirrings towards one of them, Mary determines to ride her bike bare-chested. This foray into inarticulated feminist rebellion backfires, of course; the humiliated Mary retreats into her home, bewildered by her mother's bland acquiesence and determined even more to find her place in the world. Her eventual understanding of her place as a woman -- of its power, its fragility and its vulnerability -- evolves in a powerful and frightening description of an aborted sexual assualt on her mother. That place would not be in school. Some of the memoir's best writing captures the tumultuous years Mary survived high school. A self-described screw-up, Mary constantly challenged authorities, ridiculing their perceived stupidity and rigidity, wantonly defying traditional convention and eagerly embracing a personality which glorified lassitude, disenchantment and disengagement. Her eventual involvement (perhaps devolution into) with the world of drugs causes her to remember many events in a fragmented, near kaleidescopic manner. Although a bit repetitious at times, her colorful, caustic and critical analaysis of the impact of drugs on her consciousness remind the reader of how much this young woman actually forced upon herself in her quest for self understanding. The brutal truth is that Mary Karr was lucky to escape Leechfield. "The slope of boredom there is steep enough to cast the shadow of an astonishingly high suicide rate." Despite the "crushing tedium" of life, this profoundly brilliant, angry, ironic and self-deprecating poet found not only courage, but voice. It is this unbridled tension and strength that gives "Cherry" its power. Its author is neither seeking approval nor indictment; she is merely attempting to demonstrate that the explosive impact of her environment did not destroy her. Indeed, it is that defiant, open-faced grit that gives "Cherry" its capacity to instruct.
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.
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: 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: 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: 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: Great story-telling! I saw myself in her!
Review: If you have read Liar's Club, then you will love this book! I honestly felt that Cherry was better that the first book, but I know that I wouldn't have enjoyed it if I hadn't read Liar's Club first. Liar's club gave a deep background into her relationships with her family members which is necessary to understand the interactions between all of them during her teenage years. It plays on so many themes, like sister relationships, mother-daughter relationships, father-daughter relationships, and most importantly, relationships with other teenage girls and boys. I found myself rooting for her, crying for her, and feeling the pandora's box open as she begins to realize the truths about herself and all of those she loves. And the funny thing is that the story is told in a very casual yet hilarious manner. I was always anxious to find out what happened next!
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