Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is an interesting bag. I think I wanted to have a harder-hitting horror retelling of bluebeard, one that straddles the line between extravagance and the delicious reveal, but while this does have some pretty great emotion and resonance -- look at what you made me do -- it eventually rubbed me in rather the wrong way.

Not horribly so, mind you, but in an ugly, disturbed way that isn't gleeful the way good horror can often be.

My real problem?

The erasure of innocence. Not the obvious opening of a door erasure, either, but the complicity and romanticism of JOINING in the horror, of ignoring the tragedy, of being one with it.

Maybe that's the real horror? The acceptance, the reveling in the rot?

Well, it's even worse when you read this novel not as a romantic and evil tale of discovery, but as a tale of complicity with the rot.

I think I disliked it precisely because I couldn't agree with the premise. Either I fight or die... not embrace.

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