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:

“…sometimes, best friends feel like killing each other.”

The Girl With The Golden Bouffant: An Original Jane Bond Parody by Mabel Maney

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Cbr15bingo On the road This is the second, and as far as I can tell, final Jane Bond/James Bond parody novel. This time, the action takes place in swinging 1966 Las Vegas at a convention for the accident prone that is actually a gathering of top spies, and at a “bake-off” competition that involves more intrigue and inventiveness than the spy gathering. James Bond is still out of commission and so Her Majesty’s Secret Service once again turns to his lesbian twin sister Jane to […]

An aptly named memoir

Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton & Me by Bernie Taupin

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Cbr15bingo on the air I like Elton John’s music. I know people who are super fans, and I am not one of those, but growing up in the 1970s with older siblings, I heard his music all the time on the radio or on our stereo at home. Between my sibs and me, we probably had most of his albums from the 1970s, and then with the ’80s and MTV, you couldn’t miss his videos. Recently, I heard part of Marc Maron’s interview with Bernie […]

How can a novel about dementia be beautiful?

The Swimmers: A Novel by Julie Otsuka

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Cbr15bingo Adulthood I have reviewed Julie Otsuka’s previous two novels and loved them both. Otsuka is an amazingly talented writer. Her novels are not long; her sentences tend to be short but deliver beautiful imagery and subtle emotion. They are, as I have mentioned previously, like a pointillist painting in verbal form. Both When the Emperor Was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic, critically acclaimed winners of numerous awards, deal with Otsuka’s family history: immigration from Japan to California and the experience of US […]

“What would happen if I were to leave? No one notices the air they breathe.”

The Air You Breathe: A Novel by Frances De Pontes Peebles

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Cbr15bingo South America  Bingo! When I was looking around for a book to fill the South America square on my bingo card, I came across Frances De Pontes Peebles’ The Air You Breathe. NPR’s reviewer compared it to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend series and said that they tore through this novel in 2 nights. It is similar in some ways to Ferrante’s work, and I likewise finished it within days. The Air You Breathe is a soap opera of a story about friendship and […]

A complex story about race, class, family and history

The Wedding: A Novel by Dorothy West

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Cbr15bingo politics, racial politics in particular On a summer day on Martha’s Vineyard some time in 1950s America, beautiful Shelby Cole is getting ready to marry the man she loves, and in the 24 hours leading up to the wedding, the reader of Dorothy West’s 1995 novel The Wedding becomes privy to the complicated class and racial politics that swirl around what should be a happy day. West, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, captures generations’ worth of “striving to succeed while black in […]

I want to see this Bond movie

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy: An original Jane Bond Parody by Mabel Maney

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Cbr15bingo sex This book was published in 2001 and somehow I only just heard about it a few weeks ago. It is a hoot, with the kind of silly-named characters and wacky mix-ups that you might find in a Jeeves and Wooster novel. American writer Mabel Maney gives us the story of Jane Bond, the lesbian sister of James, who drinks and sleeps around like her brother but who lives in a run-down bedsit and works at a bookstore in 1965 London. Jane is dealing […]



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