Praise for In the Cherry Tree
by Dan Pope
 

"In the Cherry Tree is a running cannonball back into the swimming pool of 1970s childhood, perfectly capturing the warmth, detail, and self-assured confusion of what I didn't realize I'd already forgotten about being a kid. Absolutely unpretentious, unsentimental, funny, and sad, it plunges you back into a world of dissolving families and dissolving childhoods, distilling in its spare prose the raw invigoration of simply being alive."
 --Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
 

"Dan Pope is a wonder. In the Cherry Tree tells the sad, hilarious truth about growing up. If you've ever loved, married, or given birth to a boy, you must read this book."
        --Jennifer Haigh, author of Mrs. Kimble
 

"Dan Pope's novel doesn't capture the world of twelve-year-old boys in the 1970s so much as it liberates it. Filled with music, cars, obtuse older siblings, parents who are struggling with their own demons, and (increasingly, tentatively) girls, In the Cherry Tree gets every nuance right-the alliances and rivalries, the exuberance and sorrow, but above all the brilliant mix of intelligence and unintelligence that characterizes preteen life."
        --Ben Greenman, author of Superbad

"In the Cherry Tree is both a love song and a lament for lost childhood. Not only is it about days gone by, but more importantly it is about growing up and learning that the life we were so sure would one day be ours disappeared somewhere along the way and here we are with this one instead. I read this strong and vibrant book with a constant smile on my face."
    --Jonathan Carroll, author of The Wooden Sea
 

Dan Pope’s brilliant new novel chronicles a childhood summer lived beneath the rumblings of an unhappy marriage. An ethnography of American suburban boyhood circa 1974, In the Cherry Tree takes you back to when you could name every actor on “The Big Valley,” wield dialogue from The Poseidon Adventure as a secret code to baffle the uninitiated, sing “The Night Chicago Died” from start to finish verbatim, and pronounce with absolute confidence that Elton John ruled and John Denver sucked. In lucid, deceptively simple prose, Pope explores childhood’s ardent faith in things worth knowing, just because. And in the necessity of judgments, the endless listing and rating of athletes, pop stars and movies - creating systems of order and value by which to live, while the Mom and the Dad, as Pope’s narrator calls them, battle it out in the next room.

Tender yet unsentimental, raucously funny, In the Cherry Tree evokes not only a time and place, but a kind of imagination that adulthood almost inevitably extinguishes in us all. You may not realize how much you’ve forgotten about being twelve years old until this novel reminds you. Anyone who was young in the suburbs a quarter century ago will be transported instantly back - for better and for worse - to familiar ground. Thought you’d left 1974 behind forever? Ready or not, here you go.

In the manner of Alice McDermott’s That Night, or Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, Dan Pope’s small, deft novel turns suburban malaise into both comedy and elegy. It’s a gem.
 -- Rand Cooper, author of The Last to Go