Discover Well-Read Black Girl Books and the projects reshaping publishing →

Book Summary and Reviews of The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker

The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker

The Cherry Robbers

by Sarai Walker

  • Published:
  • May 2022, 432 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

The highly anticipated second novel from Sarai Walker, following her "slyly subversive" (EW) cult-hit Dietland—a feminist gothic about the lone survivor of a cursed family of sisters, whose time may finally be up.

It should have been the first day of the rest of their lives.

Instead it was the last.

Iris Chapel and her five elegant sisters, all of them heiresses to the Chapel firearms fortune, live cloistered in a lavish Victorian mansion. Neglected by both a distant, workaholic father and a mentally troubled mother—who believes their home is haunted by the victims of Chapel weapons—the sisters have grown up with only each other for company. They long to escape the eerie fairy tale of their childhood and move forward into the modern world, but for young women in 1950s Connecticut, the only way out is through marriage.

Yet it soon becomes clear that for the Chapel sisters, marriage equals death.

When the eldest sister walks down the aisle, tragedy strikes. The bride dies mysteriously the very next day, leaving her family and the town in shock. But this is just the beginning of a chain of disasters that will make each woman wonder whether true love will kill her, too. Only Iris, the second-youngest, finds a way to escape—but can she outrun the family curse forever?

Sarai Walker, the acclaimed author of the cult-hit novel Dietland, building off the Gothic tradition of Shirley Jackson, brings to life this riveting, deliciously twisted feminist tale, a gorgeous and provocative page-turner about the legacy of male power and the cost of female freedom.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Walker's take on the classic Gothic tale fairly shimmers, titillating with a heady concoction of terror and desire, frothy with fever-pitched emotions, and dark with smothering melancholy and macabre spectres." —Booklist (starred review)

"Delightfully eerie…This uncanny tale of dark origins shines brightly." —Publishers Weekly

"Hooray! Sarai Walker has done it again. With The Cherry Robbers she upends the Gothic ghost story with a fiery feminist zeal." —Maria Semple, bestselling author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette and Today Will Be Different

"Walker gives us indelible descriptions of flowers, foods, and fabrics as we coexist with the vivid Chapel sisters, but inside the lush exterior, the novel thrums with violence, oppression, and blood. This fierce feminist tale hit me in the heart and hasn't let me go." —Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas

This information about The Cherry Robbers was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Click here and be the first to review this book!

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Sarai Walker

Sarai Walker is the author of two previous novels, The Cherry Robbers and Dietland, which was adapted as a television series for AMC. Her work has been published in more than a dozen countries.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
When No One Else Will
by Amanda Skenandore
1940s Chicago nurse risks everything at an illegal women’s clinic during a high-profile trial of courage and sisterhood.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket
    The Jellyfish Problem
    by Tessa Yang
    A marine biologist rescues a Maine island menaced by a giant glowing jellyfish in this inventive debut.
  • Book Jacket
    Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young
    by Zayd Ayers Dohrn
    Son of Weather Underground radicals recounts life on the run and decades of revolutionary struggle.
  • Book Jacket
    Look What You Made Me Do
    by John Lanchester
    A propulsive tale of intergenerational tension and revenge from the Booker Prize nominee.
Who Said...

All my major works have been written in prison...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Book
Trivia
  • Book Trivia

    Can you name the title?

    Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

Q S, S

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.