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:

“You did not see me — you did not look at me, and see me.”

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

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This novel is a Bildungsroman about a young slave named George Washington Black, or simply Wash. It is Wash’s recollection of the extraordinary events in his life during the 1830s, especially his relationship with Christopher Wilde, aka Titch, the brother of Wash’s master Erasmus Wilde. The story opens with Wash in servitude at Faith plantation on Barbados, but his travels will take him to many lands where the weather is different but people are often the same. Washington Black is the story of a young […]

The End is Near-ish

Blood of Elves: A Novel of the Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski

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This third book in the Witcher series is the first Witcher novel, and its focus, now that Geralt has owned up to his destiny, is on a prophecy about the end of the world. This prophecy involves war among the peoples of earth (human, elven, and other) and the unleashing of some type of very powerful magic. There is the occasional bit of monster fighting, but mostly this story deals in geo-political maneuvering and espionage as Geralt and Yennefer try to keep Ciri safe while […]

Destiny! Destiny! No escaping it for me!

The Sword of Destiny: Tales of the Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski

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This second Witcher volume, like the first, is a collection of short stories not necessarily told in chronological order. Sapkowski further develops the main character Geralt of Rivia while hitting hard on themes of a changing world and the role of fate and destiny in Geralt’s life. Some of the stories were featured in the TV series, and the reader gets to know characters like Dandelion (Jaskier) and Yennefer a little better. Sword of Destiny includes six stories, the first of which will be familiar […]

Here Come the Witcher Reviews!

The Last Wish: Introducing the Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski

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My husband is a big, big Witcher fan — played all the games more than once and listened to the audiobooks. When the news broke that the series was coming to Netflix, I knew I would end up watching with him. He’d been badgering me to read the books for ages and during the show, he kept pointing out where the TV series differed from the books (usually expressed as a complaint). It was funny because that’s usually MY job. So I have caved in […]

“Our lack of power and our oppression are one and the same…”

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

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In a recent Time Magazine interview, Tomi Adeyemi described her first volume of the Legacy of Orïsha series as a kind of answer to the question, “What if Harry Potter had been black?” If people of color were represented more widely in literature and shown to be leaders, heroes, empathetic characters, would the world learn to become more accepting of them in real life? Children of Blood and Bone is full of powerful and heroic characters, many of them female, all of them black or […]

Murder Most Fun

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

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Toward the end of CBR11, someone (Classic, I believe) posted a review of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It had been a while since I had read a good mystery, an even longer while since I had read any Christie, and having just finished The Most Depressing Book Ever, I decided to do myself a treat and see what happened to Roger. I’m not sure why murder mysteries are so gratifying — perhaps the logic of it all, the finding of answers, the […]



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