Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About Jenny S

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By day (and night really), I teach writing and run a writing center at a community college in the Chicago suburbs. However, my superpowers include racking up large library fines and creating towering stacks of to-read books next to my bed.

Jenny S's Reviews:

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One Belongs to New York Instantly, One Belongs to It as Much in Five Minutes as Five Years

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

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You know when you read a good book but you know it will just be impossible to summarize OR at least impossible to summarize well?  N.K. Jemisin’s novel, The City We Became, is one of those books.  It’s the first book in a new trilogy and now I’m bummed that I have to wait for her to finish writing book 2 and 3. But I have to give you some sort of clue of what it’s about so here goes.  New York City is alive […]

The Danger of a Simple Story – Antebellum Version

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

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This book has been on my bookshelf since December 2019 when my mom, sister, and I started doing our own version of Jolabokaflod. I’ve been meaning to read it but it took two short vacations for me to make time to actually dive into the life of George Washington Black, a young slave living on a plantation in Barbados.  Esi Edugyan’s novel is brutal and hauntingly written and totally not what I expected. The novel begins in the 1830’s where a 10-year-old George Washington Black, […]

Don’t Mess with the Dairy Queen

Bad Axe County by John Galligan

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CBR13 Book Bingo Challenge:  NEW SERIES So last week I joined some college friends at a rented cabin near Richland Center, Wisconsin, for a couple of days (which is about 75 minutes NW of Madison for those of you playing at home).  We went into Spring Green one day and stopped at Arcadia Books for coffee and some browsing.  I saw a display for the upcoming release of John Galligan’s mystery novel, Bad Moon Rising, that included a stack of his earlier books and thought, […]

But They Made Up Their Minds, If All Roads were Blind, They Wouldn’t Give Up Till They Died

She Rides Shotgun by Jordan Harper

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Brutal and beautifully written, Jordan Harper’s debut novel, She Rides Shotgun, hooked me before the end of the first chapter and was hard to put down even as I wanted to look away.  The body count is high but so was my investment in the main characters, eleven-year-old Polly McCluskey and her ex-con father, Nate. When Nate shows up at Polly’s school, Polly knows something is off because she thought her dad was still in prison.  What she doesn’t know is that her mom and […]

Never Underestimate the New York Transit System

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

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At the beginning of 2020 and thanks to many glowing CBR reviews, I devoured Casey McQuiston’s first novel, Red, White, and Royal Blue, which was just the mix of humor and escapism I needed at that moment (little knowing what a raging dumpster fire the next year would be).  I knew I would be on board for whatever McQuiston did next. Though a time-travel love story set in a New York subway was not quite what I expected, I found One Last Stop to be […]



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