Hearth and Pages: The Cherry Pickers by Gregory C. Randall

“We never know what change does to us,

sometimes it helps and sometimes it hurts, we never know.

I do know this; change will come like spring follows winter.

It will come and we will deal with it.”

I received a free digital copy of this book through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

The Cherry Pickers is a coming of age book about a boy named Howard Smith. Every Summer Howard and his family visit his grandparents house and farm in northern Michigan. Every summer they come just in time to pick cherries in their family orchards alongside the pickers. This summer, Howard and his family will face one eventful Summer like none others, which will shaped Howard and push him to understand better how life works and how much family worth.

I have a great time reading this book. The prose is wonderful and I easily swept away in its atmosphere. The writings is beautiful and it feels almost cinematic. If you like a detailed writings with clear imagery of time and place, you will like this book. It holds a certain allure that makes this book quite unique. The writings and the pace that the author creates gives the book a very light and refreshing feels, while still give us many important and realistic moments that we can relate to in real life. Rather than a coming of age story, I feel like this book tells a story of life and family love. Every small side stories that accompany the main character, contains bits of life lesson and reality which really grounded this dreamy book and I love it. That being said, I feel like at some parts of this book the pace is too slow and it actually can be quicken a bit. Not gonna lie, there are some parts where I decided to just skim it because it is too slow for me to enjoy it with a thorough reading.

I honestly thought that it’s just going to be another typical coming of age story, but I was wrong. Gregory C. Randall did a great job of bringing out some difficult and heavy issues into a coming of age book in such a nonchalant way. The story is set in 1956 in a farm in northern Michigan. So, I kind of predicted that there is going to be some racist issues in this book, and I was right. What I predicted wrong is how I thought the author is going to handle the story. I thought it’s just going to show some white savior tropes that I really am tired of, but luckily it’s not. The author handles the racism portrayal in the 50s well and though the main character and his family is white, he doesn’t really portrayed them as the white saviors. The issue that I really don’t think will showed up is the one about LGBTQ+. Though it’s not as heavily brought up in this book, I really appreciated the way the author portrays the queer characters in this book, and how the other characters reacted to their revelation. I almost forget to mention it, but the main character was born with a physical disability. I’m a bit torn about this, on one side I want the author to explore a bit more into the main character’s struggle with his disability, but on the other side I really appreciated that the author doesn’t make the disability of the main character as the most important and dominant part of the main character.

There’s one theme that I really appreciate and adore from this book. It’s how the author portrays that young fellows act and think in certain ways because they have not fully understand something. How something will upset them and confused them at the beginning because they can’t quite grasp what’s going on, and when they finally do understand it, their attitude toward some issues change. This happens to both to the main character and his younger brother. I honestly thought that this is really important. Because we often dismissed people who are hard to accept something that they considered unusual as being hateful, while in reality they might be just need a deeper understanding on the subjects and need more time to understand it. Especially if in their whole life, they’re taught that some things are just plain wrong and some are just plain right. This happens a lot to young people. They just need a push to understand that life doesn’t work that way. and it doesn’t divided into black and white area but rather many spectrum of colors and this book definitely gives a lesson about that.

In conclusion, I really enjoy and appreciate this book. It gives us a great coming of age story and a great family drama. There are also some pretty good representations of POC and queer characters considering that this book is set in 1956. I recommend this book and I want to thank both Net Galley and Windsor Hill Publishing for providing me with a digital copy of this wonderful book.