Customer Reviews

In the Cherry Tree: A Novel

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was surprised how much I liked the book as I'm in my sixties and often find the coming-of-age genre tiresome. The characters are flawed but very human and just so darned likable. The writing style is immensely READABLE. Dan Pope did a great job recreating the feeling of 1970's Anytown U.S.A. Highly recommend this book.

The thing that matters most to me in a coming of age story is that it exposes the pivotal transition between youth and adulthood in an honest and accessable way. This novel does that in spades! It's particularly effective in illustrating how entertaining and sometimes heartbreaking it is simply getting through each day. The dialog is spot-on real. Events are portayed without dictating how you should feel about them - you just naturally experience the surprise, confusion, injustice, and joy of being a kid again. Changes take place around us all the time - they frame our lives and give us substance, sometimes at our own expense - but we don't have to let them beat us and this novel left me feeling good about that.

Dan Pope accomplishes what many authors have tried to achieve and failed. He gives us a story that hits home in so many ways. There is love of family, friends, pets, and generally life- there is loss of those things too. Overall, Pope gives us experiences that we have all had, but through the eyes of his very witty and bright narrator- young Timmy, a boy who seems closer and closer to being any of us when we were 12. On each page, we go deeper into Timmy's life - deeper into the novel, and maybe deeper into our own lives. In the end, it is all of the experiences of Timmy, that Pope allows us to live vicariously, which give you a warm feeling by the novel's conclusion. He proves that togetherness in life works to keep life moving forward and Pope must know this firsthand.
A great, fun, enjoyable read by an honest voice in literature.

Dan Pope's first novel IN THE CHERRY TREE should have been published first in hardback because it definitely is a "keeper"! The book reads like memory functions. It is not a smooth narrative, but a series of vignettes, albeit arranged chronologically. The reader follows the protagonist Timmy through his last summer of childhood to his thirteenth birthday, his coming of age as a teenager.

Music is the leitmotif that runs through the novel, tying the parts together and creating a sort of verbal gestalt. Although I was quite a bit older than Timmy was in 1974, the year that Evel Knievel unsuccessfully tried to jump the Snake River, plus I am female, the story rang true. In fact, it was a trip down the proverbial "memory lane" for me, both in relation to myself and my group at that age, as well as in relation to my later, much younger neighborhood friends, who were around Timmy's age when I was a young mother in 1974. The author's mentions of Harry Chapin, Elton John, the song "One Tin Soldier", and other singers and songs brought with them for me a rather sad feeling of nostalgia for a time that was lost and that will never come again. The music also functions as it always has: it separates the young from the parental generation.

This novel puts the reader through a wide range of emotions, from humor that made me laugh aloud to the horror that comes with violent death. IN THE CHERRY TREE caused me to question my own use of language, my family relationships, and other areas of my life. For example, Timmy refers to his parents as "The Dad" and "The Mom". I believe that he uses the article "The" to distance himself from his parents, not only because his family is dysfunctional, but also because he is breaking free from his parents, in order to progress on the road to full adulthood.

IN THE CHERRY TREE is graphic when it comes to sex and the sexual experimentation of the young, the widespread male fascination with passing gas (farting), and other subjects that lack "delicacy". However, I feel that their inclusion is an honest and necessary part of the story. Males and females are different, sometimes in ways that are unpleasant, especially to the opposite sex, but Pope's novel does not gloss over this.

I bought a signed first edition of this novel and I highly recommend it to other readers. In fact, it pulled me in emotionally much more than Stephen King's "The Body" did. Dan Pope's IN THE CHERRY TREE is a novel that should not be read quickly. Instead, it should be read in a leisurely way and savored for the picture that it gives of the good and the bad of ordinary life.

In The Cherry Tree
by Dan Pope
Published by Picador



This is a novel I picked up by chance. I'd never heard of the author, and it's always exciting to start a book with no reviews influencing you. I sat on the train and was hooked in a few pages, before the train left the station. It's a convincing picture of what I can remember about growing up and growing apart from your childhood. The early self that was you suddenly seems strange.
Pope uses a refreshing and simple method to separate the generations. It's not something to reveal here because the reader needs to discover it for themselves. The conspiritorial world of the adolescent has been written about before, and brilliantly. But Dan Pope does the whole Rites of Passage thing with originality.
It's a great book, funny, insightful, touching, and authentic. I enjoyed it on several levels, all of them pleasurable. In a flowing prose style, The Cherry Tree offers an insight into US society that illuminates its essence more clearly than journalistic reporting. As a Brit, I recommend this book, especially to those who are so anti-American at the moment. They judge the States by the current awful administration, and that really isn't the whole story...
Pope's book reveals the affection and warmth I associate with the America I know. It's a wonderful read, and Timmy, the book's voice and conscience, will awaken a lot of people's memories of spots, sex, and discovery. I`m delighted I discovered this excellent book.

Crows, groundhogs, and everything in between are featured players in this sweet and readable novel. The condition of being twelve years old with some sort of obsessive-compulsive list-making thing going on while the brilliant summer sun is shining; these themes are of course universal. You might squirm. It is the non-human elements of this book who undergo real life and real death. The humans merely eat too many cherries or golf or masturbate or cheat or watch the television programming until sign-off. The animals are whacked and smashed, attacked with whatever is at hand, (SPOILER LEAVE NOW)and lose in the end when a full-length coat is the price of peace. If your adolescence wasn't interesting enough, here is someone else's. This book contains: (suggestive things and whatnot.)

In the Cherry Tree connects with the kind of satisfying impact usually remembered and reserved for a first base hit or a first kiss.

Pope's subject is the on-the-cusp life of Timmy, a boy who is being swept from childhood by events and personalities that work the edges of his world with passion and power. The bell is tolling on Timmy and he comes to the reader as wholly sympathetic. Yet Pope's real acheivement is making an original American profile like Timmy seem so utterly familiar and intimate.

We experience Timmy's world in much the same way he must, through glances and episodes within the tightly drawn emotional paddock of his neighborhood life. Pope delivers Timmy to us freshly consumed by matters big and small, without sentimentality or despair. As close as we feel to Timmy, it is Pope's streamlined, athletic prose that evokes and shapes our impression of Timmy's choices and feelings.

Pope is an Fine and authentic emerging American voice. In The Cherry Tree is the best novel I've read all year.

I gave 5 stars to this first novel because I enjoyed it very much. A delightful book! It is a fair snapshot of a 12 y/o boy summer and reads like a very true story any boy could relate from this age.I liked exactly this that there was nothing special or too deep but was full of spontaneity and sincerity.I think it is a fair account of what a boy of twelve feels and how he looks at life.Family, friends, pop-music, TV, boy games, sex- these are pretty normal interests which fill a boy`s life in puberty.I don`t agree that Timmy is a weak and boring character -a boy of twelve usually cannot give himself an account of his deep emotions. A writer can elaborate on them,looking at him from the outside, but this would not be the boy`s true voice.

I liked the idea of the cherry tree as a center of their games which possesses some unvisible magic that attracts the boys.Also,I was somehow amused by the rows between his parents- not that this was a very funny thing in itself but somehow I felt all the time that they would make it at the end.I think The Dad still loved The Mom,it was just that they were very different.The Mom acted funny and unadequate at many points but The Dad was a very cool character.

I wasn`t annoyed by all that music listening,charts and Top 100,and lurking around...on the contrary,I enjoyed all the time the real life breathing through the pages of the book.The novel is fresh,well written,witty.Well done!

Dan Pope has managed to tell the heart-breaking story of a boyhood summer full of transformations in family and friendship from the point of view of a charming protagonist, Timmy, without falling victim to the narcissitic nattering that plagues even our most well-loved young heroes (Holden Caulfield comes to mind). IN THE CHERRY TREE is transgressive yet familiar, haunting and hilarious: read this book, you won't be disappointed.

Dan,

I just wanted to let you know that I finished "in the cherry tree," and how much I enjoyed reading it. I finished it in three days, which is saying a lot, having three kids and two dogs. I'm sure you've heard this before, but it reminded me so much of my own experiences growing up in the Midwest. I thought you're characterization of Timmy, his thoughts, speech, likes, dislikes, were all very authentic. I especially enjoyed his interactions with the adults and kids in his neighborhood. The way you described the conversations is the way kids in that era talked to each other. There was a nice balance of seriousness and humor, and the pacing was adeptly handled, giving the reader another piece of Timmy's puzzle with eaach chapter. In Timmy, you depicted the confusion, the selfishness and detachment that is adolescence, side by side with the yearning for connections to something bigger. Nicely done. I'm looking forward to the next book.

Jim Ogle