reviewed by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
Toronto Star Sunday, Aug. 15, 2004

The protagonist of Chandra Mayor’s debut novel, Cherry, never reveals her name. She tells her story in episodic memories associated with each of the eight apartments she inhabits in downtown Winnipeg in the early ’90s. It's a desolate city that "holds you in its grey asphalt arms as you stumble home from the all night café, over the bridges with railings like shattered teeth."

Living in slum apartments, "drywall illusions held together with paint and wishing" that never feel like home, the protagonist’s bleak perspective is a product of her increasingly dangerous and emotionally fraught relationships. She tumbles into love with Tom, a junk-addicted, alcoholic skinhead, and struggles to maintain her connection with her best, but troubled, friend Carly. In the perverse logic of wanting to help someone she loves, the narrator assists Carly’s suicide attempt, but then takes her to the hospital in a taxi.

What elevates Cherry above the urban fiction rabble of Teresa McWhirter (Some Girls Do) or Juli Zeh (Eagles And Angels), is her characters, who aren’t hollow or underdeveloped. Without sermonizing, Mayor describes the fear and vulnerability of youth negotiating the harsh realities of inner city subcultures. She draws out the sensitivities in her characters and situates them in a wider social context.

Tom, for example, isn’t always drunk, stoned or repugnant. Mayor, a master of spare but detail-rich prose, uses a single line to show how Tom’s abusive, alcoholic behaviour runs in the family:

"I drink a Coke, there is no alcohol in this house any more and I am glad because I have seen Tom’s secret scars," the protagonist observes during a rare, home-cooked meal with Tom’s family.

Even in twisted love, the protagonist is touched by Tom’s tender letters. "I love you so much. I don’t want to be angry at you," a regretful Tom writes, transforming from a one-dimensional thug to a human being with actual feelings. "I need you to make me good. I can’t do it without you."

This is the same Tom, however, who frequently beats her up and scribbles on every page of her journal so she knows he’s always watching. Yet she perseveres with her writing because it allows her to hold onto a shred of her identity as a poet while everything else disintegrates. She is a survivor of relationship abuse and poverty, not a victim.

Even as she suffers, she takes small steps toward freedom, borrowing a pair of cherry-coloured boots to go out with friends the first time she flees from Tom in tears, her arm "striped with purple lines like a barcode from his fingers."

She eventually finishes school, gets off welfare and hides a stash of money from her grocery-clerk paycheque for her eventual escape. A survivor tells their story in a matter-of-fact way and protects their identity to maintain a measure of dignity. Victims tell you more than you want to know.

Unlike such punk rock novels as Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo or Chris Walter’s Punk Rules OK, which are usually written by men, Mayor provides a female punk perspective, linking the abuse the protagonist experiences in her relationship with Tom to systemic violence against women in the skinhead scene.

Cherry eventually realizes she is not alone in her suffering, that others have similar stories but are manipulated into silence: "You kill the women by cutting them off from each other. Then we kill ourselves and you wash your hands, smooth and clean."

Tom initially lies to the protagonist about his identity as a skinhead and keeps so silent about his activities that she is baffled by sudden police questionings and CSIS surveillance. In order to extend the narrative beyond the scope of what the protagonist knows, Mayor inserts fictional newspaper clippings to gradually reveal the whole story.

While the protagonist copes with an abortion and her best friend Carly’s move to Vancouver, one gay man is beaten and another is killed on the streets of Winnipeg by skinheads. Mayor’s newspaper clippings, along with letters and shadowy, full-page black and white photographs, transform the journal-style, first-person account into a stunning scrapbook narrative.

Mayor is an award-winning poet, and Cherry is filled with sublime writing that compels you to keep reading. Her remarkable version of Winnipeg is nothing short of prairie Gothic, complete with "rusty graffiti-tagged cars marked with the caliphs of transience." If this run-down city doesn't break your heart, its characters will.

Cherry takes you inside slum apartments, showing you patterns of violence and what it’s like to be poor before ushering you onto the fire escape and offering you a cigarette, reminding you no matter how bad things get, there’s always something to hope for, someone to protect.