The Cherry Robbers

Sarai Walker

This is a lush, atmospheric family saga set in a 1950s Connecticut mansion nicknamed ‘The Wedding Cake.’ Sarai Walker does a luscious job weaving traditional Gothic tropes into an entirely American story. Let’s call it Americana Gothic.

Meet Iris, our narrator. One of the six daughters of the Chapel family who made their fortune selling firearms in the 20th century.

At the start of the book, it’s 2017. Iris is an elderly woman, and a very successful artist (a re-imaging of Georgia O’Keeffe?), living in New Mexico under an assumed name. When a journalist begins to dig around in her past, threatening to reveal her true identity, Iris decides to tell her own story.

We time-travel back to the 1950s when daughters were obedient, hair was coiffed just so, and the power robber barons might have waned, but the hangover of their greed remained. We learn that Iris and her sisters live an almost cloistered, unhappy existence in ‘The Wedding Cake’ with their ambivalent parents: a father who is a living example of ‘patriarchy,’ and a mother who drifts in and out of reality, convinced that the house is haunted by the ghosts of victims of Chapel weapons.

We know right from the beginning that Iris has survived some kind of trauma — people don’t reinvent themselves for no reason — and on page 17, we get the setup for the whole story straight from Iris’ diary: Later, once the tragedies began to happen, one after another, the children in the village made up a rhyme about us. The Chapel sisters: First they get married, then they get buried.

The six sisters, each named for flowers, live in a dark fairytale. Their parents are pretty much useless on the parental front, so the sisters rely on each other. They bicker and snipe, but they’re devoted to each other, spending lazy summer days together, reading Tennyson, walking in the nearby woods, painting their fingernails, daydreaming about the men they might marry who will take them away from the oppressiveness of The Wedding Cake.

Aster, the eldest, is the first to fall in love and is soon engaged to the heir of a steel magnate. As the wedding approaches, gifts pile up in the library, along with wedding favors, place cards, stacks of the newlyweds’ china, and the dress — the pristine white silk dress — that Iris refers to as the headless bride.

It’s not all happy anticipation. One night, at an ill-fated family dinner, the girls’ mother, Belinda, mutters in a dreamy, frightened voice that something terrible is going to happen if Aster gets married.

And then it does.

Aster dies shortly after her wedding, and so do the other sisters, one by one, the victims of a family curse. Iris is narrating this story, so we know the curse hasn’t claimed her. Why? The answer to that and other mysteries is slowly revealed.

Sarai Walker is a tremendous writer, delicately weaving feminine fury into a lyrical ghost story. There are literary references aplenty — both overt and subtle. One of the sisters routinely quotes Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ about a princess stranded in a tower, and the title of this book is taken from a poem by D.H. Lawrence. The claustrophobia of the Wedding Cake house is reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, the family trauma and sisters parenting themselves is a bitter wink at Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the girls’ mother Belinda is a 1950s version of Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic.

The story of Iris and her sisters casts a spell as it delves into the changing gender relations and social politics of mid-century America. It’s enchanting, enraging, and triumphant — a delicious slice of Americana Gothic.

Pssst… Walker’s sentences are glorious on the page; we also love the audiobook narrated by January LaVoy. Her voice sounds like the taste of honey and butter on a warm biscuit. Then, when the moment requires it, she adds a hint of dread, like a pinch of salt, to cut the sweetness.

Later, once the tragedies began to happen, one after another, the children in the village made up a rhyme about us. The Chapel sisters: First they get married, then they get buried.

It didn’t help matters that we lived in an enormous Victorian house that looked like a wedding cake. If this were a novel, that detail would push the boundaries of believability, but that’s what our house looked like and I can’t change reality…

The house, with its cascading tiers and ornamental details, looked as if it were piped with white icing. The eyes are drawn first to the central tower… perched above the rest of the house and circled with tiny dormered windows… A prominent widow’s walk and balustrade marked the second floor, then there was the ground floor, with its bay windows and portico, curlicues everywhere, and tall stalks of flowers ringing the base.

It looked like something out of a fairy tale, that’s what everyone said. If you could have sliced the exterior of this wedding-cake house with a knife, you would have found inside six maidens — Aster, Rosalind, Calla, Daphne, Iris, Hazel — each of whom were expected to become a bride one day. It was the only certainty in their lives. — Sarai Walker

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