Cannonball Read 14

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.

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Good Cop/Bad Cat

The Eloquent Scribe: The Sitehuti and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet Series Book 1 by T. Lee Harris

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Cbr14bingo Font The main character is an Egyptian scribe turned investigator The Eloquent Scribe is the first book in a mystery series set in ancient Egypt and features a pair of unlikely investigators — Sitehuti the junior scribe and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet (aka Neffi), the sacred cat of the Temple of Bastet in capital city Pi-Ramesses. While the “mystery” in this novel is pretty straight forward and not terribly hard to solve for the reader, the charm of the story is in the characters and the potential […]

Of mice and soup

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

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Cbr14bingo Cozy “being the story of a mouse, a princess, some soup, and a spool of thread” This charming Newberry Award winning story is about a heroic little mouse and the princess he loves. It’s also about the pitfalls of being an outsider and the power of forgiveness. Despereaux’s family marks him as different and doomed from the moment he is born. Too small, with ears too big and born with his eyes open (an ill omen), everything about the little mouse disappoints his parents […]

It’s not what you are but what you do

The School for Good and Evil Book 1 by Soman Chainani

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Cbr14bingo Question (Bingo)— How did I not know I had this book? Why did it take me so long to finally read it? What do “good” and “evil” even mean? Looking over my bookshelves as I often do figuring out what to read next, this book, which I think has been there for years, recently stood out because I recognized it as the title of a movie coming out on Netflix in October. I have no idea how I came to be in possession of […]

All the good stuff that wasn’t in your history books

Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving by Mo Rocca and Jonathan Greenberg

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Cbr14bingo Bodies – Bingo Mobituaries is a fascinating, eminently readable collection of humorist Mo Rocca’s obituaries for people and phenomena that didn’t get the attention they deserved at their passing. It’s the kind of book you can just pick up, open at random and immediately be drawn in. Certainly, some of the subjects of Mobituaries are people you have heard of (Audrey Hepburn, Herbert Hoover) but Mo Rocca will reveal things about them that might not have been featured in a traditional obituary or that […]

“…leaving your country is like dying, and when you come back you are like a ghost…”

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

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Cbr14bingo Adapt/bingo – the story is about Darling adapting to life in Michigan after growing up in a Zimbabwean shanty We Need New Names is what I would call a fictional memoir based on the author’s childhood experience of moving from Zimbabwe to the United States. Darling, a teen living in Michigan with her aunt’s family, remembers growing up in a shantytown called Paradise with her friends, dreaming of moving to the United States, and then experiencing the reality of life here. This is a […]

This book kicked me in the stomach, clubbed me over the head and said, “The end!”

The Storm of Echoes: The Mirror Visitor Book 4 by Christelle Dabos

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Cbr14bingo Heart — this book broke my heart and I’m angry Writing a review for this fourth and final installment in Christelle Dabos’ The Mirror Visitor series is going to be tough for a few reasons. All the story lines that have been set up in the previous books have to be resolved here and I’m not going to lie, things get super complicated and kinda weird. The other problem is that, having just finished the series, I am feeling emotionally drained. The author has […]



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