I could not get into this book no matter how much I tried. I ended up DNFing it halfway through. It didn't keep my interest. I feel like the narrator tried to keep it together and honestly that is what kept me engaged for so long.

This gothic novel slowly worked its way into my heart and once I got the hang of the story and where it felt like it was headed, I couldn't put it down.

THE CHERRY ROBBERS is part gothic story, part love story as Sylvia Wren tells the story of her life as a famous painter living in New Mexico with her partner named Lola. She details the curse that befell on the Chapel women, beginning with Sylvia's great grandmother, her Mother Belinda, and making its way through each generation of women, after their family business of selling guns earns the family a life of means.

I loved both the physical copy and the audiobook, which was narrated by a favorite of mine, January LaVoy.

*many thanks to Harper Audio and net galley for the gifted copy for review

Great read from start to finish! The premise alone is so intriguing. The Chapel family business is selling guns, providing for a profitable and rich lifestyle. However, the 6 Chapel sisters and mother have been caught up in the ghostlike background that emanates from their psyches.
The audio version is terrific and the narrator's delivery is right on target. Her differentiation between characters was stunning and a true tribute to the plot. The intrigue kept building and intensifying. To say it was eerie is mild.
Highly recommend!

I liked the writing of this book and found the story as a whole to be interesting but it was way to long for my liking. At times the book became repetitive. How many times can we read about another sisters death without getting any real details? After reading over 400 pages I still didn't have any closure at the end.

I really enjoyed this audio book, the narrator did a wonderful job and the story is a compelling read. I wanted to know what happens to the six daughters of an arms manufacturer who live in a home that their mother claims is haunted by all the people who were killed by a Chapel Rifle. As the author's note states Belinda, the matriarch is inspired by Sarah Winchester, who was haunted by all of the dead caused by her family business and never stopped construction work on her family home until her death, believing this was the only way to keep the spirits at bay, The story of the Chapel girls is creepy and interesting with rich language and vivid descriptions of people, place and people. The reason for the 3-star rating is that the story plodded along like one of the soap operas my mother watched when I was a child. In spite of the frustration at the pacing, I truly did enjoy this book and really enjoyed spending time with the Chapel girls and their coming of age in small town Connecticut in the 1950's.

Really enjoyed this book. I always like stories set in different time periods. The way the story of all the sisters together, and then slowly the story of each succeeding sister was nicely done. The handling of mental health issues, the confined role of women in the 50's, and the patriarchal domination and control of women emerged throughout the story. Add to this a gothic and ghostly family legend and you have a really gripping story. The different ways each sister sought to escape and live her own life were varied and success rarely followed. I thought the ending was just perfect. I didn't need to know more and it made total sense. The author's afterward situates the story sort of slantwise into the stories of gun production and modern art is really interesting.

The Virgin Suicides meets Winchester Mystery Mansion, but add a dash of Georgia Okeefe and a little Yellow Wallpaper. That’s the recipe for this book, of which all ingredients are separately more fascinating than the novel itself. I wish I loved this one more, but it just wasn’t for me. It was repetitive and took far too long to reach resolution, to meet the refrain of “life isn’t worth living without love.” However, I enjoyed that the heteronormative relationships were violently doomed in a way that most LGBTQIA relationships often (terrifyingly, sadly) are—the danger to the Chapel women are men, just men. Being a lesbian saves Iris’ life. And for that alone, this book gets a solid three stars.

This had a fabulous narrator that managed to differentiate between six different sisters with her voice alone. Very much a female-powered story, there were some great feminist vibes in here.

Sylvia Wren, prolific, respected, and infamously reclusive American Southwest-inspired artist, has her peaceful old age interrupted by a journalist who claims to know more about Sylvia's life story than she ever intended anyone else to know. When the journalist begins referencing the Chapel firearms family and Bellflower Village, Sylvia feels her former life surfacing after decades of hiding in plain sight. In "The Cherry Robbers," a family falls victim to either a supernatural curse, a ghostly haunting, or a mother whose mental illness and trauma is passed down to her daughters. The truth of the Chapel family's tragedies lies in the eye of the beholder. I loved this historical fiction, gothic thriller mashup from start to finish.

For some reason, I really thought The Cherry Robbers was going to be set in the 19th century, and be a kind of alternate history, which is on me for not reading the description thoroughly enough. Instead, The Cherry Robbers bounces back and forth between the 50s, the 80s and 2017, telling the story of the Chapel sisters and their legacy as the heirs to a famous arms manufacturing company.

Sylvia has escaped that life, living all together with the family trauma, and is living in New Mexico under an assumed identity when we begin the book. Through the pages of the novel, we weave through all of the tragedy that has befallen the Chapel family, but there never really seems to be any point of the tragedy. Why is the family seemingly cursed and is there any hope to make things better? I felt like I was on a long road to nowhere reading this book.

It's got a lot of things going for it with its complex portrayal of its host of female characters and its exploration of intergenerational trauma but the plot didn't do anything special for me.

The Cherry Robbers
by Sarai Walker
Pub Date: May 17, 2022
Sarai Walker (Author), January LaVoy (Narrator), HarperAudio (Publisher)
NetGalley
Thanks to the author and publisher for the audio book! Sarai Walker has done it again. With The Cherry Robbers she upends the Gothic ghost story with a fiery feminist zeal." (Maria Semple)

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.

I enjoy listening to books as I drive. This one was great!
4 stars

This one was very much like The Virgin Suicides, but reimagined as having supernatural elements and a haunting as the cause, rather than suicides. It broke my heart but had me enthralled and anxious all the way through!

𝘔𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴, 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨!

I was not expecting this book at all and it was the best surprise ever, just wow!
Dark, with gothic vibes, a bit of horror and addictive, I loved every page of this story, it was fantastic. All the stars!

Thank you Harper Books for this gifted copy.

https://www.instagram.com/booksandcoffeemx/

This was a truly genre-defying feminist, gothic historical fiction book about sisterhood and female agency with elements of the supernatural thrown in too. Told in dual timelines of 2017 New Mexico and 1950s Connecticut, it took me a while to get into this story and I considered not finishing multiple times. Once the Chapel sisters started getting married and tragedies began adding up I couldn't put it down.

The 1950s storyline follows one family of six daughters and the haunting legacy of their family Gun empire. Their mother is troubled and believes she sees ghosts of victims killed by their guns, while each of the daughters seeks escape through marriage only to find it's not the freedom they anticipated. Only the second youngest, Iris, is able to find a way to make a life for herself that truly defies societal norms (something I loved)! But her new identity as Sylvia Wren, a famous artist, is threatened when a reporter comes digging in the present day storyline.

Great on audio narrated by January LaVoy and recommended for fans of books like The tobacco wives by Adele Meyers. Much thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance listening copy!

The Cherry Robbers is unlike any book I have ever read before. It perfectly encapsulated the beautiful and dreamy atmosphere of the time, while balanced with the haunting portrayals of a cursed family and the death that follows them.
Each one of the sisters felt distinct and real to me, and although you know that they are all going to fall prey to this curse, you hope against hope that there will be a reprieve for this family.
I went into this novel not knowing what to expect and falling in love nonetheless.

This is a character-driven novel. The main plot may be implausible as the events are laid out but the author does an excellent job and drawing a vision of each character,with only one exception. The historical references are accurate and assist in drawing a portrait of the worlds of the main character. Audio narrator is excellent.

This book was excellent. I haven't read Sarai Walker's first book, Dietland, but I will definitely be going back to read it now.
I saw a blurb describing Cherry Robbers as a fresh, feminist take on the gothic ghost story, and I was not disappointed. Gothic thriller fans are going to love this book!!
I ended up reading and listening to the book because I couldn't put the book down. Both were wonderful!

Wow, I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I requested The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker and what a wonderful experience this turned out to be.
Sylvia Wren is a notoriously reclusive artist who lives a quiet life in New Mexico. One day a letter comes in the mail from a journalist who is convinced that Sylvia is actually an heiress who walked away from her life over 65 years ago.
Iris Chapel was one of six daughters of a firearms manufacturer and his troubled wife. Iris’s mother believed strongly that their beautiful Victorian home was haunted by the spirits of all the people whose lives were ended by Chapel guns. With a distant father and mentally ill mother, the girls are eager to escape, but as the Chapel girls start marrying, they also start dying. One night, Iris disappears, leaving no clue as to where she went and no ties to her former life. But now, the past is rushing back, and bringing with it the ghosts of her past.
The Cherry Robbers is a fantastically eerie, gothic tale of feminine relationships, family, and aspiration. Sarai Walker masterfully draws you into this world, makes you care about the characters, and then crushes you with each successive wrong that’s done to them.
I received an advanced audiobook copy of The Cherry Robbers and the performance was perfect. January LaVoy did a fantastic job of capturing the eerie and tragic tone of Walker’s words and delivering a heartfelt and engaging performance.

The Cherry Robbers will be available 5/17/22.

*I received an ARC audiobook copy of The Cherry Robbers from Netgalley and Harper Audio in exchange for an honest review*

The story begins with the famous artist Sylvia Wren who has lived hidden from the public's eye for quite awhile, but that all changes when a nosy journalist starts to question who Sylvia really is and what has her still fleeing from her past. We are then introduced to Iris Chapel, who is the second youngest of the six Chapel sister who are heiress's of the firearms fortune on their father's side. All six sisters have grown up in an old victorian house that looks like a wedding cake with only their rich father and their so called crazy mother. Their mother mother is certain that the house is being haunted by the victims of the Chapel weapons and as we follow the sister's lives we see that there is something that is haunting the women in the family. The sister's know that the only way out of the cursed house is to marry and start a family of their own but right when the oldest, Astor, starts to plan her wedding their mother warns that terrible things will happen. She is ignored by everyone but Iris who tries to help by stopping the wedding anyway she can but fails. Just as their mother predicted something terrible happened and Astor dies under mysterious circumstances that can't be explained.

It took me a bit to really get into this book but once I was introduced to the whole family I was hooked. I love the character of Iris/Sylvia and her transformation into the famous American artist we met the beginning of the story. I really enjoyed the gothic atmosphere that the author painted when she allowed us inside the old victorian house and introduced us to all the sisters named after flowers. I actually started this book without really knowing what it was about other than a woman who was hiding from her past and I was intrigued when the mother warned her daughters about the horrible feeling she had if they ever got married. After the first daughter died I knew I was in for a ride of a story and was ready for everyone to start listening to their mother and Iris but of course that didn't happen. The author expertly brings up so many different themes including sexuality, feminism, family, and what it is to be a woman in a mans world. I found myself so enraged at so many parts in this book on behalf of Iris and her mother and that extreme emotion from me is thanks to the authors writing. I would recommend this book to any readers that love female narrators with gothic mystery. I really enjoyed the narrator and thought she brought the main character and her family to life.

Thank you to Netgalley and Harper Audio for the audiobook copy of this book with me in exchange for an honest review.

The Cherry Robbers is both beautiful and horrifying with a decidedly gothic feel to it. The prose is incredibly beautiful to be telling such a sad and tragic tale. It has themes of insanity, ghosts and a powerful sense of feminism all set in the 1950s of New England. While this was far from my usual read, I was drawn to Iris’s story and could not stop listening..