Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About ElCicco

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Married, mom of two, history PhD, feminist. I've been participating in Cannonball Read since CBR4. I love to read, and writing reviews keeps me from reading without thinking. I feel like I owe it to the authors who entertain me to savor their creations. It's like slowing down and enjoying a delicious meal instead of bolting your food. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: ElCicco's Quick Questions interview.)

ElCicco's Reviews:

A cozy romance about found family

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches: A Novel by Sangu Mandanna

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Cbr18bingo Refuge. The main characters hide away in a mansion, away from prying eyes The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is a novel about misfits and found family. While witches, witchcraft, and persecution are at the center of the story, several other characters have also found themselves on society’s periphery. The question is, is the purpose of life to find ways to survive or is it to find ways to really live? The novel is set in contemporary England and witches are still around. […]

Is it a “hilarious satire” OR is it a middling white guy’s rant against contemporary social norms

My Inner Child Wants to Kill: A Mindful Murder Novel by Karsten Dusse

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Cbr18bingo Or My Inner Child Wants to Kill is apparently book 2 in the Mindful Murder series by German author Karsten Dusse, with the first book having been turned into a Netflix series. I did not know any of that when I picked this one up at the library and I have no interest whatsoever in delving further into any of it. In a weird way, this book reminded me of my experience with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — white guys writing about […]

“Praise then darkness and creation unfinished”

The Left Hand of Darkness: A Novel by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Cbr18bingo Left The Left Hand of Darkness is a Hugo and Nebula award winning novel first published in 1969. It is the story of an alien envoy named Genly Ai who has come to a remote planet called Gethen or Winter in order to speak to its leaders about joining the Ekumen, a kind of alliance of other worlds devoted to the service and betterment of humanity. Genly has arrived at a time when the nations of this planet are on the verge of war, […]

“…looking back at those pages, I shivered to see our plunge into darkness, day by day, without realizing it was a spiral, and its nadir, the abyss.”

The Year of the Wind: A Novel by Karina Pacheco Medrano

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Cbr18bingo Sheep. Sheep and other livestock are mentioned throughout the novel and sheep feature prominently in a particularly important scene Earlier in the year I reviewed Rabih Alameddine’s brilliant novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) and one of the things I noted in my review is that the narrator, who is a few years older than I am, describes growing up in Lebanon and Beirut in the 1970s/80s. I was in high school and college at that time, and […]

No one knows what goes on behind closed doors

Men Like Ours: A Novel by Bindu Bansinath

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Cbr18bingo Wealth The story opens with Matthew, a wealthy man, found dead in his car I picked up Men Like Ours at our local library, drawn in by its cover which reminded me of Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens. It turns out the two novels are a bit alike. Each features Indian women living in a small-ish communities with similar complaints: financial woes, bad marriages, worries about children, and thwarted dreams. Men Like Ours, however, is set in New Jersey amongst the women of Willow […]

Don’t let the cute little kid fool you. This is a bloody tale of vengeance.

Lone Wolf & Cub Deluxe Edition Volume 1 by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

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Cbr18bingo Right – It’s manga, so you read it right to left I heard about Lone Wolf & Cub a few years ago but had been unable to find a copy of it until recently. Last year, Dark Horse published a deluxe edition of this manga classic, which was first published in Japan starting in 1970. Kazuo Koike’s original story has been translated by Dana Lewis. In addition to Goseki Kojima’s masterful and dynamic ink drawings, this deluxe edition includes a few of his color […]



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