Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About elderberrywine

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Elder LOTR/Holmes fan girl/writer since forever. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: elderberrywine's Quick Questions interview.)

elderberrywine's Reviews:

Not your Grandma’s Brazil. Your Great-Great-Grandma’s, Maybe.

Dom Casmurro by Machado De Assis

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According to the blurb on the back of this Penguin paperback, de Assis was Brazil’s greatest novelist.  (To give you an idea of the timeline here, this was one of his last novels, and was written in 1899.)  Never heard of the guy.  To be fair, though, most of my background in Latin American authors was triggered by my high school Spanish classes, which would exclude this author.  The world of Portuguese language literature is far smaller than that of Spanish language literature.  Anyway! Dom […]

Hate Always Hurts the Hater

Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby

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OK, this was a hard one to read because of the homophobia and violence, although the story is valid.  A whole lot of coulda, shouda, woulda after it’s too late. Ike Randolph is a black ex-con with a loving wife and child.  Buddy Lee is a white divorced ex-con, just barely hanging on.  One thing they have in common was their ruthless reputations while they were in prison, and a fierce desire to stay out.  The two had no connection until they are informed by […]

Treat Yourself!

Duplicate Death by Geogette Heyer

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Ah, one of my all-time favorite authors!  It’s rare I can come across a new one of hers, since I’ve read so many, but I was fortunate today.  For those poor souls who are unfamiliar with this author, her main genre is what is known as Regency Romance.  I had never once considered reading anything of the sort, until people I trusted kept nudging her in my direction.  Boy were they right.  If you would like a taste, try The Grand Sophy – so funny!  […]

Alas, a Plumber’s Life Was Not to Be

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp

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This is a used book that I picked up at some library sale eons ago, because I recognized the title.  It had been made into a 1940s “woman’s” flick that starred Jennifer Jones, and that was about all I remembered.  I was curious as to how closely the movie might have followed the book, but decided to read it first.  Judging that our introduction to Cluny is that she is an orphan in her late teens, taken in by a rather sour uncle who is […]

Know When to Fold

The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor

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When I grew up, the surfaces of my childhood were sand, scraggly Bermuda grass, and gravelly asphalt for roads.  My parents, who grew up back East, had skills that I never had an opportunity to learn as a child, such as roller skating.  Even learning to ride a bike was a fairly dodgy proposition.  And one of those old school skills, for my Dad, was shooting marbles.  I understand he was pretty damned good at it.  The “Marble”, in the title of this book, is […]

The Sound of [Not] Silence

The Silentary by Antonio Di Benedetto

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Written in 1964 by Argentinian writer Di Benedetto, The Silentary, or the “maker of silence”, is set in a nameless Latin American city in the early 1950s.  The nameless narrator is a young man who aspires to be a novelist, and silence is the one thing he cannot control at all.  For no matter where he goes, noise is always there.  He shares an apartment with his mother, and has a friend from work (a nameless bureaucratic agency), and a girlfriend, Nina, who soon moves […]



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