Cherry Baby

(by Rainbow Rowell)

I was totally charmed by the first 100 pages or so of this book, and I ultimately didn’t hate it, but it turned out to be a different kind of second chance romance than I was expecting, which somewhat lessened my enjoyment of it. When the book opens we meet Cherry, who’s 36 and starting the process of getting a divorce. She goes to a concert and runs into Russ, a guy from college she had a massive crush on, though he ended up dating her best friend for like a year back then. (She thought that she and Russ had chemistry, but then he made a move on her friend, which she thinks is probably because she is and always has been fat, unlike her friend.) It turns out Russ is divorced, and they have an excellent evening, and it seems like at this point in their lives maybe they can be good for each other. But it also turns out that things with Cherry’s estranged husband, Tom, are very much unresolved. He’s been in LA working on a movie based on his webcomic-turned-book, but now he’s back in Omaha to get his stuff in preparation for moving to California permanently. Except actually he doesn’t really like all the movie-publicity stuff he has to do and it seems like maybe he’d rather not be in California at all, and also he and Cherry never even really talked about the thing that prompted her to say she wanted a divorce. At some points I felt like there was too much going on: the Russ plotline, and the Tom plotline, and flashbacks to earlier moments with both Russ and Tom, and oh also Cherry is one of five sisters and historically they’ve all been fat but now one of them has lost a bunch of weight but hasn’t actually told anyone that she’s taking Ozempic or something like it, though everyone is sure she is, and the rest of them all feel betrayed/resentful about it. Still: there were a lot of things I liked about this book: the sex scenes are fun, and Cherry’s uncertainty about how she ended up in the situation she’s in and what she should do next felt very real, and Cherry and Tom’s dog (who is named Stevie, after Stevie Nicks) is a delight.