Cherry Bomb by Maxine Clair Book Review

Some memories blur and fade, but some stay crystal clear. Maxine Clair characterizes the adult narrator’s unhappy memories of her fifth grade summer as memorable, sentimental and impressionable through her use of elaborate imagery, revealing diction and memoir like structure.

The narrator vividly describes the setting of her childhood to characterize her memories. She practically gives step-by-step instructions to find her secret hiding place through her descriptions of old jackets, the cool texture of the plaster on the wall, and the aroma of the cigar box. From this it is apparent that the box of her private things was so sentimental to the narrator that its hiding spot is etched in her memory. The cigar box in the closet symbolizes her childhood memories. Both are hidden and suppressed and the narrator has trouble talking about their importance in detail but instead just makes blunt, short statements like “My box of private things” and “After Eddy’s accident, he gave me a cherry bomb. His last.” Descriptions of the weather, the neighborhood, the Hairy Man and her childhood world illustrate the childish tone of piece as the narrator seems to go off on several tangents.

The revealing diction of the prose piece illustrates how memorable the memories are to the narrator. Certain words like the references to God, the Bible, hollering, heat waves and locusts help define the Midwest setting. The narrator seems to be very impressionable at this age as she refers to “Daddy-said-so facts,” “my father said,” “which my mother said” and “I wasn’t sure what it meant but it just had the right ring.” The narrator is very impressionable, soaking up what others say; she does not seem to form her own opinions. The narrator just states the facts as she observes them. Her constant references to her family show how much she values them and the good relationship she has with them. The narrator uses a lot of hyphens to string along sayings or phrases, such as “God-is-whipping-you,” “that-old-thing,” and “Daddy-said-so,” which reveals that, as a child, the narrator absorbed what everyone said. These phrases give the impression of what her family is like.

The structure of the prose passage starts out generalized, yet it becomes specific; it then goes back to a generalized, reflective view. The first paragraph of the prose piece is a broad overview of the setting of the narrator’s childhood. The description of the heat wave, the locusts, the vegetation and her neighborhood and her statement “Life was measured in summers then” characterizes the monumental summers of her childhood. The second paragraph briefly mentions the cherry bomb and, as a result, anticipation grows. The title “Cherry Bomb” is the source of this anticipation. The third paragraph ends with “My box of private things” and the fourth paragraph tells the story of Eddy’s incident. If there was no fifth paragraph the narrator keeping a cherry bomb would seem sort of insensitive and perhaps even mocking of her cousin’s injury, yet the fifth paragraph pulls the piece together and explains the sentimental value of the cherry bomb; “It was the first thing anybody ever gave me.” The memories are characterized as bittersweet because they are somewhat unhappy times, but there is a silver lining in that her family is together to endure them. The sentimental and even pitiful tone of the last line illustrates the irony of the catastrophic cherry bomb as a “memento of the good times.”

Maxine Clair characterizes the narrator’s memories through elaborate imagery, disclosing diction and a structure that seems to build upon itself. Through these literary devices the unpleasant memories of her childhood are characterized as sentimental and memorable, despite how dismal they appear.