Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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:

Great art tells the truth and that can be dangerous

The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Eugene Yelchin

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Over the summer BlackRaven reviewed this book and I immediately recognized the name of the author. Eugene Yelchin illustrated/co-wrote one of my favorite books, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, and BlackRaven’s review made The Genius Under the Table sound too good to pass up. And indeed it is! Eugene Yelchin was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and The Genius Under the Table is a memoir of his childhood in Leningrad, a childhood marked by secrets and repression. Yelchin was born in the mid-1950s, […]

Gruesome and Grotesque but also Wow!

The Wolf and the Watchman: 1793: A Novel by Niklas Natt och Dag

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Cannonball! I think I was only able to finish this novel, which really is extraordinary, by cheating on it with The House in the Cerulean Sea. I tend to be “monolibrous” — I word I am coining to mean one who does not start a new novel until having finished the one they’re already reading. The Wolf and the Watchman was so intense, and so gritty and disturbing, that I had to take breaks from it. It is to the credit of Swedish author Niklas Natt […]

I like you just the way you are

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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This is one of the sweetest stories I’ve ever read. It’s about difference, exclusion, prejudice, unconventional families, the magic of love and inclusion, which all sounds lovely and perhaps a bit cliché. The thing is, author TJ Klune writes about these topics in a way that is sometimes surprising and always effective. Klune has created a world in which magic and “monsters” exist, and those children who show signs of having magic are separated from the rest of society and put in orphanages run by […]

Blackout (of a character and on the bingo card)

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

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Cbr14bingo Gaslight/Bingo Blackout  Action takes place during and in decades prior to WWI. A couple of characters struggle to believe the truth and question each other’s reliability. The Return of the Soldier is a novella that exposes the iniquities of Britain’s class system against the backdrop of World War I. It is a heartbreaking love story that focuses on the women in one soldier’s life as he convalesces following an unusual injury in France. This story features four main characters. The injured soldier, Captain Chris […]

One Bad Day

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

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Cbr14bingo Scandal/bingo  Published in 1988 generated controversy for its violence, treatment of Barbara Gordon, Moore’s later criticism of his own. See this story in the Guardian. Batman: The Killing Joke, published in 1988, has had enormous influence on Batman movies and seems to be the generally accepted version of the Joker’s origin story. While I haven’t seen all of the Batman movies, as I read this graphic novel, I recognized that Hollywood has largely adopted Alan Moore’s story as canon. Moore himself in subsequent years […]

Putting the fun in dysfunctional

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

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Cbr14bingo Holiday/bingo Holidays on Ice is a collection of David Sedaris essays, some previously published and some new, all related to holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Halloween are all represented through autobiographical reflections as well as imaginative fictional stories. If you are unfamiliar with Sedaris, you should know that his writing is both hilarious and often shocking. He has a talent for making very inappropriate and unsettling statements but often in such a funny way that you laugh anyway. Like many people I became familiar […]



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