A review by meaganmart
The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker

4.0

I screamed loudly for as long as I could, letting the awful sound scrape my throat and strain my muscles. It was a scream worthy of my mother, of my sisters in their final moments. It was the scream of the Chapel women.

I had no idea what to expect when I cracked the spine of The Cherry Robbers but I was struck by how poignant a story Sarai Walker created. The story is not a horror in the traditional sense; the only hidden monsters were the unflinching men of the 1950s who bent women to their will and to their expectations. The true horror at the core of our story was the societal expectations foisted upon women of a certain class and color. The march down the aisle signaled the end of their (limited) freedom, the end of their dreams outside of homemaking and child-rearing, and the beginning of a lifetime of being taken advantage of by husbands who saw them as trinkets to be dusted off and paraded around before being unceremoniously dumped back off in a house in the suburbs while they lived largely in the city.

Readers won't be able to tear themselves away from the unflinching portrait Walker paints of the six Chapel sisters, five who met their untimely deaths and one who survived. The story Iris paints of their childhood and of the hideous events that unfolded through the summers of the 50s will stick with readers long past the final pages.