The Cherry Robbers without a doubt has a gothic feel to it. An absentee parent, the other parent seeing ghosts, a big historical home filled with daughters that dream of escaping into a different life. And the sisters, six in all, named after flowers, doomed to die when falling in love with a man. One would think that the sisters would wise up, given tragedy after tragedy and yet each has her own reasons that lead them down a path of destruction after death befalls oldest sister Aster after her wedding night. Admittedly, on a personal level, I wish Walker had had the sisters die differently than they do, leaving the reader more room to wonder if they were cursed, or if things happening just happened to be horrible coincidences. The story is told by second-to-youngest sister Iris, who is the only sister who survives well into adulthood - and hides her past behind the successful pseudonym Slyvia Wren - as a hugely successful artist. Is Iris the only one that survives because she's the only one who takes her "crazy" mother's warnings seriously from the very beginning? Each sister has their own personality, but is paired off with another sister because of their age. Both feature into the storyline and how it impacts their decisions. It's a good story, an interesting concept, but it did kind of feel like the story started dragging to me. It feels like Walker spends a decent amount of time building up the relationship between the sisters (fairly enough) but after that it tends to swing wildly back and forth between drawing out details on what leads up to several sisters' deaths and whiplashing through several others. Please note that from the very beginning of the story the reader knows that Iris is a lone surviving sibling, so the mentioning of her sisters dying above is not a spoiler to the content of the book.