In Maxine Clair’s “Cherry Bomb” the adult narrator tells about her memories from her 5th grade summer. Her story of the private box and the cherry bomb shows her childhood innocence of the summers she had as a child. Through diction, imagery and her structure she creates the sense of a wonderful summer we would all surely enjoy.Maxine’s use of diction shows how close the memories truly are. She shows how young and innocent she is when she says “I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it had just the right ring for a lofty statement I should adopt.” She also uses hyphenated phrases such as, “Daddy-said-so,” “God-is-whipping-you,” and “that-old-thing” when she is talking. Those phrases show the dialect of where she is from and how she has absorbed
