"In my dreams, my man is a white bird again with a black hungry eye. I am a table laid out, my bounty renewed daily; a dead rabbit, a loaf of bread, a basket of sour cherries. Daily, he feasts one me."

A gothic slow burn that slowly chips away at you and gets under your skin. A book that keeps you wondering "Why won't she leave?", when you know why she can't.

We start off with Agnes, a woman who has recently lost her own baby, as she becomes the wet nurse of a young boy born into a wealthy family. She takes on the challenge of caring for this boy throughout his childhood because his own parents seem to keep their distance from him. As he ages, she notices his nails grow too fast, he smells of soil, and has an evil aura to him. Nonetheless, she loves him as her own, even if she fears him.
As soon as he becomes a man, he marries a young woman who becomes his first wife, or in other words, his first victim. Things start off happy, but wherever they go, rot and ruin follow, causing crops to wither and townspeople to die. And each time they're ran of a new town, he becomes more and more angry. The angrier he becomes, the more brittle, sickly, and scared his wife. Thus begins an endless cycle of abuse and the haunting stories of his ghost wives.

Natalia successfully captures the feelings and phases a woman in an abusive relationship goes through and their terrifying fight to stay alive throughout the book, but I will say there were some chapters that dragged a little over halfway through. Although I do understand the need for repetition when discussing these themes, it felt much longer than its 200ish pages. The last quarter did reel me back in! Lastly, I don't know if I agree with the blurbs saying this a "feminist retelling" - does a story of abused women told from their POV make something feminist? More so a marketing issue or a bigger discussion to be had, but otherwise a beautifully written retelling.

In the end I will be recommending this book. If you like literary horrors, folktales, and exploring power dynamics and abuse, this is for you.

Thank you Tin House and Netgalley for the ARC. :-)

Sour Cherry is an atmospheric retelling of the Bluebeard fairytale. The characters are well-developed and the feminist energy strong. I recommend this modern reimagining to any who enjoys a fever dream vibe to their stories. This is an impressive debut and I look forward to reading Natalia Theodoridou’s next book!

I'm so happy I was able to read this — Natalia Theodoridou makes a debut novel look easy. This reimagining of the story of Bluebeard is guided by Theodoridou's melodic prose and its beautiful descriptions of decay and despair. Flipping between the story itself throughout different periods and its higher level narrator, it's neither embellishment nor erasure of the original text, but still something entirely her own.

Theodoridou has a great way of constricting her readers emotionally. Oftentimes I found myself choked up at these moments where the despondency of these women is illustrated with such gravity. Bluebeard I feel is typically regarded as some sort of a legend (of a killer, yet a legend nonetheless), but Sour Cherry subverts the concept of the abuser as the main character. The novel is able to meditate on the rinse and repeat of abusive cycles and the detrimental rot that it havocs all around while still maintaining its overarching spotlight on the women and the "cherry girls".

Really really wonderful. Thank you Tin House for the copy!

I love a good retelling, especially if it's told like a fairytale.

<i>Sour Cherry</i> is a folkloric reimagining of Bluebeard. Told in turn by the chorus of women threaded throughout his life—wet nurse, mother, wives—the reader comes to empathize with Bluebeard despite his heinous acts.

What's noticeably absent from the story is actual scenes of violence. We have everything but Bluebeard's most infamous deeds: the string of wives and lovers, the foreshadowing of inevitable death, and each person's ultimate demise. Unfortunately, without a real picture of what is happening, all we have are the excuses of the abused who, for whatever undisclosed reasons, choose to stay and accept their fate.

I think this is meant to be feminist by centering the women in the story and delving into the complexity of abusive relationships, but I don't know that it goes far enough in emphasizing the harm. I kind of walked away with the feeling of, "Well, he's not such a bad guy!" and, "He was cursed from the start and so it was inevitable!" This, after there were so many wives coming in and out of the picture, the narrator stopped even naming or numbering them.

The pacing and plot are also a bit uneven. The beginning is a really fleshed out, if at times, irrelevant, look into Bluebeard's upbringing and early life. Towards the end, the story grows repetitive and it's not clear what we're gaining by an endless slew of wives, here for a paragraph, gone the next. Given the nature of the source material, I think this may have been more effective as a novella or even a short story. That said, many reviewers really enjoyed it, so I may have an outlier opinion on this one. I'd recommend this book especially to fans of S.T. Gibson.

What I liked: I love a book with dark forest vibes and borderline-horror undertones. This book is about domestic abuse but told stylistically like a dark fairytale taking place over centuries (?). There was a heavy dose of magical realism. The writing is gorgeous and heartbreaking.

What I didn't like: it got a bit repetitive for me about 75% through. I couldn't tell if this was intentional to really hone in on good days vs bad (murderous?) days and the cyclical nature of a toxic relationship, and overall to paint a picture of bleakness (and I've read books that do this well, i.e. Demon Copperhead). But I couldn't really see where it was going and started to lose interest. I also found some of the stylistic choices confusing and jarring, like the shift between past and present as the narrator addressed her child. To be fair I'm not familiar with original work that this book is retelling.

Anyway overall, I enjoyed this book. If you like dark fairytales (Comfort Me with Apples came to mind a few times while reading this) I think it's worth picking up.

I took a chance with this book because I don’t normally ready fantasy, magic realism or fairytale retellings. I thought the book was good, it was a lot deeper than I would have imagined. The topics that shape this book are sad but the author has a way of telling the story so that you might not realize.

A retelling of a classic French folk tale.

Fun and adventurous.

Ugh, I loved this. We need more good retellings of classic stories that won't make the original author flip in their graves. Sour Cherry is the story of Bluebeard, a murderous wife-killer, from the perspective of his victims (mostly). The ending had me GOBSMACKED. Also, just to stay on the "gobsmacked" train, the format was so fun and engaging that it made me want to read it cover to cover. But back to the plot, it was so original and fun (I've used this word so much, but it is a fun, fast-paced read, and I want to emphasize that). The middle was a bit muddled in some parts, but it did' stay that way for long, as it would switch plot points very fast. love love love!

Sour Cherry is strange, beautiful, and totally unsettling. It’s not your typical ghost story or fairy tale—it’s more like a haunted memory, told in pieces, with a lot of rot and cherries and questions that don’t get easy answers. The writing is gorgeous and eerie, like a dream that keeps curdling.

It’s about abuse, control, and the ways stories get told (and twisted). I didn’t always know what was happening, but I felt it. Definitely not for everyone, but it worked for me.

Sour Cherry is a ghost story with elements of fantasy and mystery, narrated by we don't know who until the end, and to us but we can't be sure who we are either; so it is confusing. I find it interesting that some call this a retelling of Bluebeard's Castle, a story as straight-forward as Sour Cherry is convoluted. Granted, there is mention of dark moods making the husband's hair look blue, and he does wear a beard, and of course there is a series of dead wives.

Young Agnes left her humble village home to work as a nursemaid at Lord Malcolm's opulent estate. Little Lord Tristan's fingernails grew at record speed, he always smelled of dirt, and tragedy seemed drawn to his presence. A creative cherry motif works its way throughout this suspenseful tale, from palm-reading under a cherry tree, ghosts heaving cherry pits, blossoming cherry orchards, wives pregnant with cherry pits, breath smelling of spoiled cherries, thumbs being pressed against the cherries of someone's eyes, to a basket of sour cherries at a picnic.

I wanted to know why so many characters had leaves in their mouths, was Lord Malcolm a pedophile? What happened to Agnes's friend Nadya; is she the listener? How do all the crops in the village keep dying? Why put eyelashes in the food? But despite there being so much I didn't understand, I appreciated that this story was clearly a meditation on abuse from many different points of view, that of the victims, the abuser, bystanders, and the complicit. Why do they stay, why do they go, what happens to their souls, and is there ever justice?

Very eerie. Full of black mold. Not a horror or suspense story by any means, this is a retelling of the Bluebeard folktale ;focusing on the man himself, this freak of nature, whose impulse is to ruin things and continuously seek someone to love him except that he can never understand love or reciprocate it.

My only complaints are that I like the original ending better in which the last wife of Bluebeard asks to see her sister before he’s about to kill her and her sister brings the wife’s brothers and they kill Bluebeard. (So satisfying)
Secondly, I felt the cherry references are a bit overbearing, I won't be going back to take a tally but the amount of times the fruit or tree was mentioned inspired the idea and that speaks for itself.

These are personal opinions and it didn’t take away from the book as a whole. I’d recommend this one for the beautiful prose alone.

An exploration of intergenerational violence, toxic masculinity, maternal enabling, domestic violence, making excuses, and reasons why women don’t just leave, Sour Cherry seeks to ask what makes a man a monster, and how can we stop it from happening?

This book is fast-paced, a long and complicated story being conveyed from mother to child in the cramped confines of their home as they wait for help to come. They have limited time and the mother has so much to tell her young boy. It’s the story of all of the generations of men that have come before him, although she wants to conceal that fact from him. She just wants her boy to break the cycle. To not be like his father, or like any of the men of the line before him. So this story is told furtively, just between the two of them, along with the ghosts of the past. This adds a deliciously spooky appeal to both the storytelling and the overall story and a gothic feel with the claustrophobia and isolation. That isolation is echoed in the story the mother is telling, full of lonely, rotting, crumbling mansions and desperate, innumerable wives to the same line of violent men.

This was so interesting I plowed right through it, even though I thought I might have a hard time with the writing style at first. I got over it quickly with the lovely prose and inventive story format. I came for the thought this would be weird girl lit but I stayed because it turned out to be sad girl lit with some ghost girl thrown in for good measure. 4⭐️


I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Folklore Retelling/Ghost Fiction/Gothic Fiction/Literary Fiction/Magical Realism

Hmmm. I have mixed feelings about this one. Sour Cherry was one of the most hyped books I wanted to read in 2025. Unfortunately, the hype didn’t live up. This a new spin on a classic story, but the writing style didn’t work for me. It was very muddled and repetitive. I liked the dark themes surrounding abuse and power, but I didn’t feel much of anything while reading it. The characters felt flat and lifeless. This isn’t a bad book, but it didn’t inspire me or held my attention the way I thought it would.

Thank you, Netgalley and Tin House for the digital ARC.

I hate referring to things as "dreamy," but damned if that's not what this ended up being. Having lived through a sort of the abuse depicted here, I'm usually v sensitive to reading about it. But the quality of the writing kept it from ever being too much, and insisted that I not look away.

Wow.

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

Retelling "Bluebeard," one of the most unsettling folk tales I've ever encountered, was a shoo-in to get my admiring attention for this novelist's debut effort. At about the 45% mark, the scene under the cherry tree, I found the time jumping wearing me down...no particular effect was, in my observation, intended for these shifts. They do not seem coupled to changes in emotional register, or attached to revelations of characters' understandings of themselves or each other. Instead they felt to me like ways to avoid exploring an important shift in something because after the time shift the event shifted from is dealt with in short and sharp explanation..."after that Tristan looked at his hand a lot"...without much depth. As this story explores the fear and the disappointment that must inevitably accompany truly loving another person, that matters. The ending was, as a result of this ongoing issue, a bit anticlimactic.

The plus side is that this is a retelling of a quite brutal tale that tries hard to be in the main character's corner. Something that gives kids like me nightmares is brought into the realm of reason. It's very empathetic, it's very willing to engage the readers' empathy. This makes the awfulness all the more poignant and impactful, and is the source of all my positive feelings for the book. It grapples with the deep, oceanic sadness of loving someone who is haunted by an awful past, whose emotional tides do not stop at the shores between himself and the world. It brings a lovingkindness to the seemingly cursed eternal outsider, yet doesn't play the victim card for the monster or the lover.

Craft quibbles aside, I found this story quite engrossing or I'd've simply Pearl-Ruled it. I haven't raised the thematic elements of horror to content-warning status because, frankly, if you need CWs on ancient folktales you won't consider the read for more than a split second anyway.

A debut novel that portends a career of fascinating work. I already want to read Author Theodoridou's next book.

This was a lyrical, haunting, lush new version of a retelling that absolutely CAPTIVATED me, reminding me about power of storytelling. Sour Cherry is more than just a retelling but rather a story of generational trauma with themes layered in so naturally, the lessons weave in and out of the story like a fine braid of information from author to reader.

I don’t think I’ve read any other book quite like Sour Cherry. I was originally drawn to this book because of its being described as a Bluebeard retelling, a story that I have read numerous renditions of at this point in my life due to an interest in folklore in college. This book is tragic at times and suspends disbelief at others, but throughout you get a sense of the horror that women deal with when living in abusive relationships.

The setup of this book is really interesting with sporadic fourth-wall breaks as we are sitting on one of the wives telling the story to her son while surrounded by the ghost wives of the man being described in her story. The storytelling has plenty of gothic flourishes and feels like a mixture of true life events and fairytale which makes sense in the context as the woman is trying to disconnect herself from the events in order to be able to tell the story to her son.

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that so perfectly encapsulates what an abusive relationship feels like with both the love and the hatred intertwined and really showing why these wives would want to stay in an unhealthy relationship. With so many wives, we really got to see the gamut of situations that can lead someone to staying in an abusive relationship. The book is repetitive at times and some aspects feel way too drawn out while others are rushed through, particularly with some of the wives in the middle of the book, but every single writing flourish and style feels deliberate to tell a story of a monstrous man and the women and men that find themselves ensnared in his web.

The descriptions of the rot and decay and the effect this man had on people and the landscape were just top tier and will stay with me for some time. This book was kind of everything I wanted in a fairytale retelling, and my biggest complaint is probably the ending and how it felt a little bit disjointed and maybe too ambiguous to pack quite the punch I would have expected after reading the rest of the book.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.
I had no prior knowledge to the blue bearded fairytale which may have had some thing to do with my level of enjoyment. I was initially intrigued by the premise - I think a survivor processing her trauma through writing a fairytale is amazing. I also enjoyed the quick shifts of narratives. I think my main issue was with the pacing, I became less and less interested as time went on and it took me about 2 weeks to get through this very short novel. I really enjoy this authors writing style but I think the actual story could have been better.

A gothic twist on a Bluebeard re-telling. Throughout the book, we follow the lord from birth as he lives his life through cycles of tragedy, moving from house to house, wife to wife. We are hearing about the man from his most recent wife as she is telling her son the story of his father's life. In order to protect herself from her tragic past and bad memories, she recounts his life as more of a fairytale than the true history.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Tin House Books for this digital e-arc.*

A thrilling retelling of the Bluebeard legend, this novel takes on many different genres and succeeds in them all. A must-read for fans of Gothic horror, literary fiction, or folklore!

The gothic, feminist horror of my dreams! I loved everything about this - atmosphere, writing, characters, everything. It was totally stunning and I will be reccomending this one to everyone.