Review Time

I went to Barnes and Noble  yesterday and bought an interesting-looking book. Being a major bookworm, I had it finished in a couple of hours and I thought to myself that it would be kind of fun to review it. So without further ado, here's my take on the book Slice of Cherry by Dia Reeves. Spoilers ahead!

Ah, yes. Where to begin? I really did like this book, and I thought it was well-written. The details were great, the characters were realistic, and it was what I would call "delightfully spooky". The main character of this story is Fancy Cordelle, who, along with her sister Kit, live in a Texas town by the name of Portero with their mother (who they refer to as 'Madda'.) Their father, an infamous serial killer known as 'The Bonesaw Killer' is in jail soon to be put to death for his crimes (torturing fifteen people to death in the family basement.) It quickly becomes clear that this is no ordinary town; monsters are common and they do terrible things such as ripping innocent people to shreds. This isn't really considered a problem in this town and is mostly shrugged off. Also, ghosts are real, and sometimes corpses rise.

These girls seem normal... for the first three sentences of chapter one. A prowler breaks into their bedroom while they're sleeping and proceeds to gently snip a lock of Fancy's hair off. She calmly contemplates jabbing a pencil into his eye but then decides against it and, when he turn away advances on him, intending to smash him in the head with a paperweight. Kit is quicker to the draw and stabs him in the gut with a switchblade. They happily push his body into the cellar where their father once did his torturing, and proceed to slice his body open with knives, constantly stitching him back up so that he remains alive for more torture.

I was a little alarmed at this but thought, OK, so they're psychopaths. That's interesting, I guess. Wonder if it's genetic. I was all settled for a gore-fest, where these fifteen-year-old girls are no better than monsters. But I was surprised; throughout the book they show themselves to be realistic and, dare I say it, relateable people. Yes, throughout the entire story they keep killing people in progressively disturbing and graphic ways, but they seemed like real people as well. They had crushes, flaws, and emotions. Fancy is able to create a magical world, her "happy place", in which she and her sister are able to kill and not get caught, Soon everybody in the town is queueing up, asking the duo to murder people for them that they want out of their lives for one reason or another and Kit and Fancy of course, accept, but there is usually a twist in their scheming.

This book was very good, but it was not perfect. Several things about it bothered me,such as the fact that the FREAKING MAYOR knows about this. He KNOWS that two of his citizens are MURDERERS and he doesn't even stop it, he instead encourages it as long as they don't kill "good people" as their father had done. And to me the sex felt thrown in; Fancy hates this boy named Ilan for the good majority of the book but by the end she can't get his pants off fast enough. Why, Fancy, why?! And the magic of this town felt sort of tossed in. I felt as if the girls were monsters enough; were the fairy rings and demons and rising corpses really necessary? To me, it felt as if the magic cluttered up an otherwise good story and I personally think it would have been better without it.

Some things I really liked about this book included the focus on family. The relationship between Kit and Fancy and their mother was complicated at best. Madda must have known that her daughters were murderous sociopaths. There's no way she could not know. For heaven's sake they decorated their bedroom with preserved squirrel organs in jars! And the fact that she caught them coming home drenched in blood more often than not? Sure, she was a very busy woman; with Daddy in jail she had to provide entirely for the family. My guess is that she didn't want to know what her daughters did when she wasn't home, that she knew subconsciously to protect her conscious mind from the truth because if she knew the truth beyond a shadow of a doubt she'd be forced to turn them in. This provides some really interesting, thought provoking questions, such as "If I thought somebody I loved was doing terrible things, what would I do about it? Would I even be able to turn them in?" And the girls are often attacked by sad feelings that they can't be their real selves around their mother; they are constantly wishing that she was "like them". This is also interesting; I suppose even really bad people like these girls must feel love for some people and just wish to be understood.

Also, I liked how the author never really gives this story a time setting. The girls listen to phonographs, but they also shop on EBay. They wear Mary Jane's and play Jacks, but they use cell phones. What time setting could this possibly be? It's very intriguing. And that's a word I could use to describe the entire story: intriguing.

I give this book four and a half hearts and I reccomend it to any reader with a strong enough stomach to handle gore and violence. There's some really good plot and character development here, don't worry; it's not ALL gore,