PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"I was prepared to assume the hype surrounding Nico Walker’s debut book was more about the novelty of an incarcerated author than the quality of the prose, which has been hailed by some as next-gen Denis Johnson. Then I devoured Cherry in close to a single sitting and understood why this harrowing roman à clef about war and drug addiction has found an audience ... Cherry is never just a parable. It doesn’t let us off the hook that easily. It puts us in the passenger seat with the narrator, dying to love America and ready to kill, or at least rob a bank, for an honest moment ... Cherry is not perfect by any means. The women are one-dimensional, mostly there to do drugs and have sex with or to be agents of disappointment ... That [Walker] bet his life on fiction is laudable. That he delivered is literature.\
