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A stunning reimagining of Bluebeard―one of the most mythologized serial killers―twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.
The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord's baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy―until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.
Natalia Theodoridou's haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.
"Haunting...simmers with dark enchantment and Gothic menace...The language is atmospheric and surprising...the characters are inventive in chronicling nested fairy tales and unsettling metamorphoses." —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"The women's accounts start to feel repetitive, and the conclusion is a bit rushed, but Theodoridou grimly explores themes of gender oppression and domestic violence as the evil man's wives vanish and are replaced one by one. This dark allegory will linger in readers' minds." —Publishers Weekly
"A folktale, a whisper, and a dream all at once, Theodoridou's debut is beautifully told in rhythmic, singing prose. Sour Cherry is unforgettable―one of my absolute favorites of the year." ―Rory Power, New York Times bestselling author of Wilder Girls
"If you love Kelly Link, Angela Carter, and Carmen Maria Machado, then Natalia Theodoridou is your new favorite author. Sour Cherry is a hell of an impressive debut. Subversive, haunting, fantastical but all too real and relevant." ―Benjamin Percy, author of The Ninth Metal
"A Bluebeard retelling of profound beauty and wisdom, Sour Cherry shows us how abuse traps people in stories that help them excuse it―but also survive. Theodoridou is a novelist with a poet's ear and a playwright's nose for irony. His prose is lyric, yet exquisitely controlled: every word feels necessary and inevitable. Like Angela Carter, he uses fairy tale to trace the dark undercurrents of human desire. But Sour Cherry transcends the form of the fairy tale retelling. It moves like a dance, resonates like a chorus; you wake from it as from a dream. Read it and be changed." ―B. Pladek, author of Dry Land
This information about Sour Cherry was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Natalia Theodoridou is a queer and transmasculine writer whose stories have appeared in venues such as Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, and Strange Horizons, and have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. He won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and the 2022 Emerging Writer Award by Moniack Mhor & The Bridge Awards, and has been a finalist for the Nebula award multiple times. He holds a PhD in media and cultural studies from SOAS, University of London. Born in Greece, with roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey, he currently lives in the UK.
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