I can't pinpoint the exact point where The Cherry Harvest "jumped the shark" for me, but I can affirm positively that as I approached the end, I was no longer buying what Lucy Sanna was selling.
The book begins well enough, with the Christiansen family struggling to make ends meet as World War II grinds on and the pool of available men to harvest the cherry crop has completely and utterly disappeared - that is, except for the possibility of using German POWs, a possibility that only strong-willed Charlotte is able to contemplate. Charlotte successfully badgers first her husband, the mild-mannered Thomas, and then the town's leaders into allowing this, only to face undreamed of consequences when her son returns from Europe wounded, broken, and bitter.
The biggest challenge for me in really buying into The Cherry Harvest had to do with both the number of events occurring in a highly condensed time frame, the number of unlikely coincidences required for the pieces to fit together, and the unlikelihood of so many of the individual events occurring, let alone occurring in rapid succession. Couple that with an incredibly rushed ending and...yeah. While I'm on the topic, my biggest beef has got to be how hurried the ending is. Sanna relies on an Epilogue to tie up some of her plot, but a few lines to resolve key plot points left me feeling cheated, to say the least.
The character of Kate, the daughter, was the best developed, and her character is certainly the most sympathetic, particularly as she struggles with her loyalties to her parents and brother Ben.
Final verdict: there's a lot of good (historical) fiction out there. The Cherry Harvest was too over-the-top for me to class it in the top tier.
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