Review: Sour Cherry

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A critic said, “Gothic tales rely on distant pasts and faraway lands full of people unlike us,” except he was wrong, because the land of this story is everywhere. The people are us, the time is always. 

I buddy read this over on a horror Discord. 

Quick thoughts and comments: 

I'm a big fan of folklore, Gothic, horror, and Bluebeard reimaginings/retellings, so I was pretty much the ideal audience for this. I don't know how, but this felt like a fast read and one that dragged all at the same time. The synopsis/marketing copy talked about it being a feminist take but it takes until the second half for the focus to really be on the wives of the tale. That and the different pov and tense changes feeling needlessly challenging and confusing to try and create a mysterious creepy vibe, was mostly why I had a problem with this. Also, some aspects of the story were focused on (Tristan) that felt  counterintuitive and interruptive  to the story's messaging of how abusive men get societal protection and how women get placed in and manipulated into caretaker and shield roles in abusive relationships. 

The first half felt super wonky with how it was structured but the second half read better to me, even though I was annoyed at how it sped through the wives, except for Eunice where I thought the story really settled into what it wanted to be. The focus on the last “special” wife Cherry was back to annoying to me because I think the story lost it's focus again and seemed to want to end the story with stating that Cherry was just as bad as the abusive man, which ok, but then what is this story really about, not what I showed up for based on the synopsis. 

I liked this and was annoyed with it, the atmospheric wonky structured folklore parts mostly didn't work for me but since I'm a fan of that type of storytelling, I still found parts I liked, I think a good chunk of readers will struggle with it, though. The first half felt like it focused on everything and nothing and when I finally found the story working for me in the second half, it sped through it to get to the final wife, a character that did nothing for me. I liked how it showed the systems that protect abusers but not sure this retelling did anything new or attention catching.

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