The Bitter and Sweet of Cherry Season: A Novel by Molly Fader: book review

The Bitter and Sweet of Cherry Season (2020) is set on a cherry orchard in northern Michigan in America.

Twenty-seven-year-old Hope Wright and her 10-year-old daughter Jenny (nicknamed Tink) arrive at aunt Peg’s Orchard House – an aunt she has long forgotten. Aunt Peg is not very friendly. Peg agrees to the arrangement if Hope helps with the three-week cherry harvest.

The house is old and run-down, but the smell of coffee in the mornings is familiar. Hope learns that her mother used to take her to the farm when she was young. She wants to know more about her mother Denise, who died of cancer, and her father, whom she never knew. But aunt Peg doesn’t know much.

Hope’s new life blossoms with the cherries as she works with a nice man called Abel Rodriguez. Tink, on the other hand, is bored on the farm. She hatches a plan to go into the room that aunt Peg keeps locked.

This is a light read about three generations of women, their past partners and past secrets, and father-daughter relationships. And there are three cherry recipes at the end of the book: brioche, chutney, and jam.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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