What first caught my eye was the title and the book cover. To be honest, I didn’t notice the skull until about six months later. I liked the vintage way it was designed and already had a misconception of how the story was going to go. It was the cover that had me picking up the book, but then I read the back copy.
A young medic returns from deployment in Iraq to two things: the woman he loves and the opioid crisis sweeping across the Midwest. Soon deep in the thrall of heroin addiction, he arrives at what seems like the only logical solution: robbing banks”Well, that along with the yellow clearance sticker got my vote
Well, that along with the yellow clearance sticker got my vote.
My preconceived notions were blasted out the water with that back copy, so I wanted to know more. And, to be completely open here, I’m a sucker for buying books, especially ones that seem discarded. I felt a little bad for the author who I didn’t know, that his book was just thrown into the clearance section.
I took the book home and set it in my ‘to read’ pile, which is almost the size of the Tower of Babel, and went on with my business. Time went by and I didn’t read the book. Then the pandemic hit and school came home and we had to sell our house, blah, blah, blah.
As we unpacked our books in the new house I picked it up and determined to read it. Even with the back copy having shattered my first impressions wow the book, once I started reading it I found it to be even more shattering of my thoughts on what a memoir is or should be.
At times it felt a bit like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is why I almost threw it out. I hated that “memoir” by Dave Egars. I found it to be so nauseatingly self-righteous that I only finished it to say for sure that I hated it.
But I didn’t throw Cherry out. There was a magnetism that kept pulling me back in to it.
Cherry is tragic, heartbreaking, real, raw and emotional. There are more F-bombs in here than my eyes can really take and yet I can’t stop reading. The way the narrator speaks is irritating and heartbreaking. He’s a jerk and yet he’s so unloved and lost you can’t help but root for him. The war in Iraq was written about in a different way than I’ve ever read before with the boy joining the military in the first place simply because he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
They made a movie out of the story and I’m pretty intrigued to see how they did it. The chapters are haphazard and sometimes such a small glimpse, exactly like a memory, that I wonder if they made the movie as choppy. It works for the book, but the amount of choppiness might make our heads spin on the big screen.
Almost finished with the book I went to look up Nico Walker to see if I could get him on the show, which is when I found out they’re making a movie of the book. Already there are instagram stories about the love story between the main character and Emily, which If ind strange. The love they have for each other doesn’t seem to transcend heroine in the actual book, but since America probably isn’t wanting to see that on their television, I wouldn’t be surprised if they make these two the modern day Romeo and Juliet.
Since a girl can never be really a c-word (as the main character describes Emily a few times) in any movie but must transcend into almost goddess-like status, Emily looks to be made out to be much more sympathetic than she comes off in the book. In the book she’s selfish and out of touch with what her boyfriend needs while away in Iraq. She is narcissistic in coming back to him only when she has no other option and gets him to marry her and pay for her college while sleeping with other men. The narrator says over and over again how much he loves her but it comes off as puppy love (probably since they’re between 20-25 in this story) and we have to remember that it’s only his side of the story. Not hers. The the narrator also gets himself messed up with girls who don’t care about him before finally returning to Emily as they descend down the black hole of heroin addiction.
The story hits hard and rough, it feels gritty and makes you never want to go to Cleveland. But each time I put it down I wonder about the men and women I’ve passed by in the my lifetime who are so far gone into drugs that the first reaction most humans have is to turn away.
I think of the man in the story who says it’s easy to find pills to buy, “you just ask the poor ones”. More than anything this book had me looking at my life and thanking the heavens that I stopped before heroin and that several times I was aware of what I didn’t want the end result of my night to be in order to say no to the free cocaine.
My heart hurts for the girls who don’t have enough self-love to not sleep with losers, allowing them to use their bodies in exchange for attention or drugs, and my heart hurts for boys who are made lost by terrible parents and losers by our government. Everyone’s parents seem to be facing their own strange demons, leaving their children to grow up lost and disillusioned and, frankly, messed up. And don’t even get my started with the lies our government had to wrangle up to get these boys and girls over to Iraw just to come home more messed up and to abandon them to despair, PTSD and drugs.
I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t want to have their idea of war, America or the opioid crisis challenged. Anyone who holds a disdain for middle America might have their heart strings pulled, so beware there as well. And it certainly isn’t YA, I don’t care what the movie trailers are trying to twist about it. This story is hard to swallow and should make you think about things most of us don’t want to on a normal day.
I don’t agree with the Washington Post that it’s “A miracle of literary serendipity.” I read that and think, “did you read the book?”
Like Charles Dickens this book will stick to you, follow you, haunt you. The characters aren’t going to leave just because you close the book. They are out on the street corner begging for cash with a lost and hallow look in their eyes.
In the strangest way, this book will have you looking inwards towards yourself. Not only to give thanks for the little bit of wisdom you had in not doing all the pills and drugs at your fingertips when young, but also that your parents weren’t completely horrible people and that your school wasn’t horrendous and that your friends didn’t get you pulled farther and farther into a dark hole.
The story isn’t written in a way that will have you contemplating the word sequence or wondering how the author put together such a perfect sentence, but it will change you. And you’ll never look at that young man who can’t control his head bob and who’s wearing long sleeves when it’s 90 degrees outside the same again.