SOURCE: Woods, Vicki. “Escaping from the Boondocks.” Spectator 286, no. 9021 (30 June 2001): 42-3.

In the following review, Woods offers a mixed assessment of Cherry and observes that the central subject of the work is not sexual awakening but rather an intellectual awakening.

The fin-de-siècle fancy for novelised memoirs is still going strong—and very harrowing they are, too. Millions of people have read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and his sequel 'Tis, and the desperately gloomy A Boy Called ‘It’, and the sharply post-post-modernist A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Why though? Why? I can understand why the books are written (for closure, darlings, closure: the holy grail of modern America. There's nothing like a good sharp pen for writing of your childhood wrongs). But it's less easy to see why they're read so voraciously. Maybe we're all so smug and cheerful about our own dear home lives that we...