Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About ElCicco

CBR 4
CBR 5
CBR 6
CBR 7
CBR 8
CBR 9
CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant
CBR17 Participant
CBR18 Participant
CBR18 Levels

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:

We Are Family

The House of Broken Angels: A Novel by Luis Alberto Urrea

by Leave a Comment

The House of Broken Angels is the story of two days and of a lifetime. It’s a beautiful novel about family; about pain, sorrow, and regret; about love, forgiveness, and perseverance. The de la Cruz family is gathering for two momentous events: the funeral of Mama America and the 70th birthday of Big Angel, Mama’s oldest son and patriarch of the extended de la Cruz clan. Yet, as everyone knows, this will be Big Angel’s last birthday; cancer has wracked his body and he has […]

Iranian immigrant experience, part 2

The Stationery Shop: Novel by Marjan Kamali

by 1 Comment

My last review was The Saffron Kitchen, a novel set in modern London and in Iran in the 1950s and ‘60s, a novel about interrupted love and political upheaval. The Stationery Shop is a similar type of novel, set in 1953 Tehran and the modern US and also featuring interrupted love and political upheaval. While The Saffron Kitchen alludes to political developments in Iran, its main focus is on the trauma these events have caused its main character and her relationship with the love interest […]

Important reminder that refugees don’t WANT to leave their homes

The Saffron Kitchen: A Novel by Yasmin Crowther

by Leave a Comment

I found this on summer vacation at an independent bookstore at Rehoboth Beach (Browseabout Books). It was a staff pick, and as I had had luck with previous staff picks from this store (Mudbound), I invested in this novel. And I am not disappointed. Published in 2006, The Saffron Kitchen is a beautiful, heartbreaking, entirely realistic story about Iran and England, mothers and daughters, the desire to be free and the pull of home and the past. Yasmin Crowther, the daughter of an English father […]

Shining Light on Colonialism

Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah

by Leave a Comment

Dr. David Livingstone died in May of 1873 in a village called Chitambo (in present day Zambia), located in central Africa. His African attendants buried his heart there, embalmed his body, and then transported it along with his papers over 1500 miles to Zanzibar so that they could be returned to England. The journey took 200+ days and two of the men on the trip Susi and Chuma gave a short account of it, mentioning illness and deaths within the travel party and other dangers […]

Debut novel worth noting (Cannonball and Bingo Blackout)

Oksana, Behave! by Maria Kuznetsova

by 4 Comments

Cbr11bingo Reader’s Choice, substituting for Two heads are better than one Bingo Blackout/Cannonball! I picked this one up for the cover, but I bought it because it is related to the interests of my youth — Slavic studies and history. Maria Kuznetsova’s debut novel manages to be both funny and serious as she describes the life of Oksana Ivanovna Konnikova from her childhood, when the family moved from Kiev to Florida, until her adulthood. Oksana has to deal with loss, uprootedness, unrequited loves, and disappointing […]

“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

by Leave a Comment

Cbr11bingo Banned Book, bingo #10 & 11 A frequently challenged classic according to ALA Slaughterhouse-Five propelled Kurt Vonnegut to fame when it was published in 1969. It has been banned in a number of school districts over the decades for language, sex and religious references. Slaughterhouse-Five is  Vonnegut’s attempt to write about his experience as a POW in Dresden during WWII, where he witnessed the firebombing that destroyed the city and caused the deaths of 135,000 people. Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war classic that shows through […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo