Cleveland, Ohio, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee and ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the army. Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. His fellow soldiers smoke; they huff computer duster; they take painkillers; they watch porn. And many of them die. He and Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound, and the drugs on the street have changed. The opioid crisis is beginning to swallow up the Midwest. Soon he is hooked on heroin, and so is Emily. They attempt a normal life, but with their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at – robbing banks.
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EMILY’S GONE to take a shower. (PROLOGUE)
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(Vintage Digital, 29 May 2019, audiobook, 7 hrs 50 mins, borrowed from @NACLibraries via @BorrowBox, @POPSUGAR Reading Challenge, A Book Written By An Incarcerated Or Formerly Incarcerated Person)
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I enjoyed Cherry. I chose this book at random as it fit the Popsugar category. It’s marketed as a novel but there’s a sense that some of the events in the book may be taken from the author’s own experiences. This is a fun, entertaining read. The narrator has a dry sense of humour verging on sarcasm that I really enjoyed. The narrator and Emily are both a bit fucked up and make mistakes and poor choices but you can’t help love them a little and root for them to get their love and life under some kind of control. I enjoyed this and would recommend it.
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