SOURCE: Shulman, Alix Kates. “Hungry for More.” Women's Review of Books 18, no. 3 (December 2000): 19-20.

In the following review, Shulman argues that, despite some problematic elements with the narrative voice in the volume's second half, Cherry is an admirable and “worthy sequel” to The Liars' Club.

The plot is an ordinary plot: American girl traverses the tricky terrain of adolescence. First bra, first pimple, first love, first kissing game, first date, first real kiss, first period, first smoke (marijuana, it being the late sixties), first betrayal, first run-in with the principal, first sex. Familiar territory: in its key events Mary Karr's school life in 1960s hardscrabble Texas is remarkably like mine in 1940s suburban Ohio, with a cherry's “market value” surprisingly unchanged.

But Cherry is no ordinary book. Karr is a poet, high on language. She won't permit her prose to be violated by a bland verb where a...