In the Cherry Tree

by Dan Pope

Book Overview

With a wholly original voice, this stunning debut novel captures the overwhelming transformation from childhood to adolescence

An ordinary suburban Connecticut summer in the seventies is the stage for the miraculous world of Timmy. Twelve years old and full of boundless curiosity, Timmy lives an ever-expanding life of record collections (of which Elton John is king), neighborhood bullies (of whom Franky DiLorenzo rules), best friends,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312422369
• ISBN13: 9780312422363
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful read!

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.

Honest, poignant, and funny!

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.

Many animals:

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.)

I cannot tell a lie-TERRIFIC

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.

Getting That Warm Feeling All Over

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.