Cherry Baby

Rainbow Rowell built a devoted readership on characters who feel so real you half expect to run into them and Cherry Baby is her most pointed novel yet about what happens when someone turns a real woman into a character. It is a romance, a divorce story and a quiet act of reclamation, told with the wit and tenderness that made Eleanor & Park and Attachments modern comfort reads.

What it's about

The premise has a delicious sting to it. Years ago a cartoonist immortalized the woman he loved as a comic-strip character and that sunny, adored version of her went on to live a life of her own in the culture, while the actual woman had to keep being herself. Now, on the far side of a divorce and a hard-won reckoning with her body and her identity, she decides she wants her own story back.

Rowell threads that idea through a very grounded present-day narrative: the awkwardness of starting over, the pull of a second chance at love, the slow work of separating who you are from who you were drawn to be. It is funny and rueful and unafraid of the messier feelings and it treats its heroine's relationship with her own body and self-worth with real care rather than easy uplift.

Why everyone's talking about it

Cherry Baby marks Rowell's move fully into adult contemporary fiction and her fans have been waiting for exactly this. She has always excelled at the specific ache of longing and the comedy of everyday life and here she aims that gift at midlife reinvention, a subject the romance shelf has been hungry for.

If you love character-first romance with genuine emotional weight, this is a warm, smart, deeply satisfying read. Readers who prefer their romance frothy and low-stakes should know Rowell goes to some tender, self-critical places about identity and body image along the way. Come for the second-chance love story and stay for a heroine finally becoming the author of her own life.

The verdict, for now

Read it, especially if you grew up on Rowell. Come for the clever comic-strip conceit, stay for a big-hearted story about taking your narrative back. It is the grown-up Rainbow Rowell novel her readers have been quietly hoping for.