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:

A Whole New World – At Least to Me

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn

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cbr17bingo TBR This was fascinating, a murder mystery set in a time and place that was unfamiliar to me.  In the early 1950s, South Africa had just entered into its apartheid era.  What had been previously informal, now became rigidly structured by law.  The population was strictly divided between the whites (original Dutch settlers and the mostly English settlers that followed – two distinct groups), the native Africans, and the colored population (for the most part settlers from India and anyone who was of a […]

As It Says on the Tin, a Novel in A Flat

Ellington Boulevard by Adam Langer

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cbr17bingo Green Now I’m not even gonna pretend to understand the world of semi-rent controlled rental property, not to mention rampant gentrification, of the 1990s New York.  Seems like a product of an endless supply of need and a limited amount of acreage on which to build. Be that as it may, this is the story of a man (jazz musician) and his beloved dog Herbie Mann, a formerly abused mutt saved from an animal shelter death sentence.  They have lived in an apartment in […]

Town of Big Shoulders Indeed

The Third Rail by Michael Harvey

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cbr17bingo Review The Third Rail is the last of a trilogy of gritty Chicago mysteries featuring ex-cop and current PI Michael Kelly.  The first, The Chicago Way, focused on the police department.  The second, The Fifth Floor, expanded to the mayor’s office, and this last installment reached the last of the triumvirate that governs Chicago politics. But let’s start with the plot.  Random women, riding the public transportation system, are being assassinated. Many of the large U.S. cities were, in the 1990s, often a dangerous […]

Major Tom? Can You Hear Me?

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

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cbr17 bingo Migrant   Like the title says, an archive, a family one, loaded into boxes and carried across country from New York to Arizona.  The family is a hybrid one – the husband with his son and the wife with her daughter, yet the two children are a team.  Good thing they have each other to rely on.  The parents met as part of a project to document the soundscape of New York City, but when the wife meets the mother of a classmate […]

Not Exactly Mexican Gothic, But Close Enough

The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

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cbr17bingo Border Now this was an interesting one.  Mexican Gothic is my jam, and I thought that this would be along that vein, but it turned out to be definitely its own thing – an intriguing cross between fictionalized family lore and magical realism.  And when I looked up the translation of Part Two – El Tragabalas, I discover that it is the book’s title in Spanish, but it is also the title of a fairly well known Mexican movie from the mid-60s, and the […]

Mooses? Meese? Why No Plural?

Massacre Pond by Paul Doiron

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cbr17bingo Favorite Well, there is a massacre of sorts involved here, but Massacre Pond is identified as being somewhere else than this locale, and isn’t really involved with this story.  Makes you wonder who chooses a title, and I suspect in this case, it wasn’t Doiron. Anyhoo, the massacre victims consist of ten moose.  All shot point blank on a game refuge, and clearly not for the meat.  Someone (make that two someones) are clearly trying to send a message.  There is a season for […]



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