Book Reviews

Cheri
By Colette

I read this book as a dual language book.  I simply wanted to learn French better.  (I'm always wanting to learn French better.)  The left side of the pages have the text in French; the right side in English.  You can switch back and forth and learn what you don't know. The French person could learn English much better and vice versa. 

But about the content itself.  This story is very well done. It's mainly a character study since there's not a lot of action, and the people rarely do much more than sit around and chat, which is what I imagine many people did back then when they had a fair amount of money and didn't have to work fulltime.  After a while, the characters become very engaging and interesting.  You begin to hope for the best, knowing that it's an impossible situation.  And when another female comes along, everything is hopelessly ruined. Love triangles are the worst kind of math.

This is a book that I thought would make a great play.  But alas, that's been done.  Apparently it wasn't done very successfully, for it ran for a short time and I'm not sure anyone is putting it on today.  As far as movies go, that's been done as well…several times.  After some research I've found it's been done about six or seven times, most recently with Michelle Pfeiffer last year.  I may actually try and see that on.

Nevertheless I'll keep the book around.  I think it still has a good shot of the play.

Addendum:

So I finally read the introduction. I do that only after I've read the story since some introductions give away too much or ruin things. Turns out that the author, Collette, did begin Cheri or some form of it as a play or with a drama in mind. Ah! That makes sense. That's why it fits so well into that genre. The introduction writer commented on several reasons why the play format was so prominent in the story.

So yeah, I guess there was a really good reason why I kept thinking of this book as a play.