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:

Imagination is real

The Book Censor’s Library: A Novel by Bothayna Al-Essa

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This is a wonderful book about imagination, books, libraries, and censorship. It’s a love song to some literary classics and a picture of a dystopian not-too-distant future where most literature is banned and burned. How far would you go to preserve the ideas and literary creations that have formed us? What is worth saving? What price would you pay? The characters in this book have no names; rather they have titles or descriptors. The main character is the Book Censor, a man who wants only […]

Love on the Spectrum, Austen Style

The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh: A Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery by Claudia Gray

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I enjoyed this installment of Gray’s Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney Mysteries even more than the previous book, The Late Mrs. Willoughby. I think in large part this is because the main characters and the setting for this one are straight from Pride and Prejudice, featuring a couple of my favorite characters: Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins. After two successful sleuthing adventures, Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney have returned to their own lives. Jonathan is back at Pemberly with his parents Lizzie and Darcy, while […]

The gang’s all here!

The Late Mrs. Willoughby: A Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery by Claudia Gray

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My local bookstore recently had a table full of Claudia Gray’s Jane Austen-based detective series on sale, so I picked up a couple, not realizing that I was starting with books 2 and 3. That’s a little bit of a shame, and I might circle back around to the first book eventually, but I still find this introduction to Gray’s series most entertaining. Gray has taken Austen’s best known and beloved characters from across several of her novels and created extended families for them, including […]

It’s all fun and games until the gods show up

All Hail Chaos: Time of Iron Book 2 by Sarah Rees Brennan

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All Hail Chaos is the sequel to Long Live Evil, which I reviewed favorably last year. At the time, I thought this sequel would end the story, but it looks like we are in for a Time of Iron Book 3, and there is a doozy of a cliffhanger at the end of book 2. My overall impression of All Hail Chaos is that it was … fine. Honestly, I felt like the pacing was kind of slow, and some of the more interesting character […]

Accept the things you cannot change or change the things you cannot accept?

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

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The Memory Police is an unsettling novel. The descriptions I read in advance made it sound a bit like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. It is a dystopian novel, and it does involve the authoritarian suppression of knowledge and personal freedom, but while I think of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as “political” science fiction, The Memory Police is not exactly that. The most disturbing acts of suppression in The Memory Police come from within the people themselves. The story is set on an island where some […]

A lovely choice for Mother’s Day but get your hankies out

Foster by Claire Keegan

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This novel, which is barely 100 pages long, packs an emotional wallop. Set in rural coastal Ireland, Foster is the story of an unnamed girl, age unknown (I’m guessing 7 or 8-ish), who abruptly finds herself living with an aunt and uncle one summer. In these few pages, Claire Keegan beautifully reveals the pain and longing of this child and of her relatives, and the roots of each. The novel opens with this girl and her father getting in the car on a Sunday morning […]



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