The Cherry Robbers

In a Nutshell: Great premise, could have had better execution, disappointing ending, slow! Unlike what many reviews tell you, this isn’t a Gothic horror. More like a historical atmospheric suspense.

Story:
New Mexico, 2017. Sylvia Wren is a well-known but reclusive artist. She stays on the outskirts with her partner Lola. But when a persistent journalist hints at digging into her family roots, Sylvia knows that she can’t hide under the assumed identity anymore.
Flashback to Connecticut, 1950s: Iris Chapel is one of the six Chapel sisters. With the Chapel name being known for their firearms fortune, Iris’s mother Belinda is convinced that their house is haunted and cursed by the spirits of those killed by Chapel guns. The six girls are fed up of living with a weird mother and an absentee father and they see marriage as their only means of escape. However, not long after the first sister is married, tragedy strikes, and keep striking with devastating consequences.
Why and when did Iris Chapel become Sylvia Wren? You need to read and find out.
The book comes in the first person perspective of Iris/Sylvia.




What genre it is: Atmospheric, historical, drama, minor traces of suspense and magical realism.
What genre it is NOT: Horror, Gothic, murder mystery, thriller, paranormal.


❌: It is a slow read. (which is not a good thing for a 430 page book.)
✔: it still kept me hooked as the suspense made me go faster and keep flipping the pages.

❌: Lots of depressing stuff. Too many deaths.
✔: The foreshadowing helps you be prepared for the deaths.
❌: Too much of foreshadowing can also spoil the suspense.

✔: Loved the complicated relationship between the six siblings. Never goody-goody. Very realistic. All six named after flowers and have personalities almost matching their flower-names.
❌: When you like the characters, you do feel sorry for what happened to them. And what happened to them isn’t good.

The Cherry Robbers is a gothic novel set largely in 1950s Connecticut about the six Chapel daughters whose family acquired great wealth producing firearms.  Their melancholy mother Belinda, deemed mentally ill by most, believes all the girls are cursed to die if they form romantic attachments to men.  The novel is narrated by Iris, the second youngest of the six children and the only survivor (not a spoiler, it's pretty much spelled out in the opening pages).

When I saw that the story was set in Bellflower Village near Greenwich, CT I thought the name was close enough to Bell Haven, CT and that this novel would fictionalize the Martha Moxley murder.  Fortunately this was not the case, although it does draw on the history of firearms manufacturers in Connecticut and characters draw influence from the real life figures Sarah Winchester and Georgia O'Keefe.  The better part of the novel depicts Iris' coming of age story and the extensive grief of seeing her sisters one-by-one.  The novel has feminist overtones and critiques of the weapons industry.  The framing story set in the present day details Iris, a successful but reclusive artists living under the nom-de-plume Sylvia Wren, dealing with a persistent journalist attempting to reveal her hidden past.

I read the first chapter and had that rare gut feeling of knowing that this was a book I was going to love. So I would recommend this: read the first chapter, and if the writing connects with you in that first part, and the narration and story so far intrigues you, don't look up any other reviews and go into the rest of the book blind.

I didn’t just love this, this is my favorite read of 2022 so far. It's a thrilling gut-punch of a book. The night I finished it, it kept me up till 4AM because I didn't want to put it down. Maybe I need to read better books, but this doesn't happen often with me! The last time was with Emily M. Danforth's “Plain Bad Heroines” and... now that I think of it, I would recommend “The Cherry Robbers” to anyone who loved that book too. Like 100%.

Read this if you love gothic books with gorgeous prose writing, feminist and queer elements, some spookiness, and a whole lot of tragedy.

“I’ve finally come to realize that it’s my destiny to be one of the madwomen. One of the women who speaks the truth no matter how terrifying it might be.”

Sylvia Wren, the protagonist of The Cherry Robbers, has been forced to write a memoir – partially to preclude a rapacious journalist from writing a magazine biography or her, and partially to attempt to exorcise her past that has haunted her. In her eighties, Sylvia is a widely famous painter living in New Mexico with her wife, far from her cursed family.

The journalist's harassment forces Sylvia to reveal herself to the reader. We learn her secrets – her birth name was Lily Chapel, an heiress of the family firearms fortune. One of six sisters, she witnessed at least two of them commit suicide directly after being married, and expected that the rest of them would suffer the same fate. Her mother was cold and aloof, plagued by her belief that the ghosts of victims of the Chapel weapons haunted the huge “wedding cake” mansion. Shades of Sarah Winchester and her similar fear of avenging spirits.

Sylvia's language is lush, beautiful; we see the Chapel household as isolated, stifled, awash with stifled female sexuality that loathes or fears sexual intimacy with a man. Sylvia's childhood was in the 1950s; neither her mother nor her older sisters obtained any independence. This atmospheric narrative, burdened with grief and guilt, is nevertheless entrancing as the reader follows the course of the Chapel sisters' lives with bated breath. At least I did.

Family curses, ghosts, madness – the exotic features of the Gothic novel. But this novel is sadder, weighted with history and suppressed emotions.

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher via Bookish. This is an honest review.