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:

Gateway to Science Fiction and Octavia Butler

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

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Cbr13bingo Gateway, Bingo #9-11 (horizontal, vertical and inner square) Parable of the Sower (1993) is an astoundingly prescient work of science fiction. Octavia Butler (1947-2006), winner of Nebula, Hugo and MacArthur prizes, tells the story of hyperempath Lauren Olamina in mid-2020s California. I reviewed this novel for the 2015 Cannonball Read, and I do believe that it (or really any written by Butler) would be a Gateway to reading more sci-fi/fantasy, and I hope a Gateway to reading more by Butler. Butler writes powerfully and […]

Like the circles that you find in the windmill of your mind

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Cbr13bingo Rec’d, Bingo #8 Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi has been reviewed about a dozen times on the Cannonball Read, first by tiny_bookbot and most recently by Debcapsfan. Every review of this book has been 4 or 5 stars. Published in 2020, Piranesi was nominated for the Nebula Best Novel and won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is an astonishing fantasy novel about the world of the mind and the myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. I must say that while I thought […]

Unearthing History

In the Memory of the Forest: A Novel by Charles T. Powers

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Cbr13bingo Landscape, bingo #6 and #7; Cannonball! In the Memory of the Forest was published in 1997, shortly after author Charles T. Powers died. This was his one and only novel, having spent his career as a journalist covering Eastern Europe for the LA Times. I remember reading this novel after it came out and thinking it was amazing, but it has been almost 25 years. Does the novel stand up? Yes, it does. In the Memory of the Forest is a story about Poland’s […]

If Rube Goldberg had written humorous novels…

Cocktail Time by P.G. Wodehouse

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Cbr13bingo Libations, Bingo #5 (Diagonal) I love PG Wodehouse novels, especially the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves series, but this story featuring Uncle Fred, aka Lord Ickenham, is almost as hilarious and entertaining as the Bertie and Jeeves books. Lord Ickenham, in his 50s I think, is the sort of man who knows how to stir up trouble and then orchestrate events so as to calm the afflicted and afflict the calm. In true Wodehouse fashion, there are a number of plots (mostly involving money and love) that […]

Part Fantasy, Part Messianic Fever Dream

Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella

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Cbr13bingo Sportsball Here’s one of those rare (for me) cases of the movie being better than the book. Shoeless Joe, the basis for the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, is a decent-ish fantasy swathed in backward looking heteronormative tropes where a beleaguered white messiah-figure brings redemption to all around him. The parts of the story that interested me involved the baseball field and the players from the past who were resurrected when main character Ray Kinsella built it in his cornfield. Unfortunately, those […]

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Cbr13bingo Cityscape, bingo #4 Row 1 The Pulitzer-Prize winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, set during WWII, is the story of two teenagers who share an unusual connection. Marie-Laure Leblanc is blind and trying to survive the war in St. Malo, France. Werner Pfennig is an orphan with a genius for math and engineering in Zollverein, Germany. While they are on opposite sides of the war, they share a love of science, knowledge, and the world. Yet when we meet them, during the […]



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