Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A heartbreaking tale of children being failed by the adults in their lives again and again

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

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“Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.”

Here’s the thing I don’t get about me and literary fiction: why do I hesitate so much in picking up these books? I mean, yes, they tend to be slow-reading, and every once in a while, they will take their toll on me, but so often I end up giving them 5 stars that I can’t understand what stops me.

But I digress; let’s talk Bingo.

If my calculations are correct, and I think they are, I have 2 spots left for a full bingo: Uncannon and Libations. I have a list of about 10 books that I have read but not yet reviewed over the past couple of months, and I had been toying with the idea of using N.K. Jemesin’s The Fifth Season as my Uncannon spot. But while N.K. Jemesin might be a black woman; she’s still American. “Something other than Eurocentric”, you said; “Challenge yourself as much as you are able”, you said. Well, thank you. 🙂

After scouring my seemingly never-ending Audible library, I decided at the end of September I would read The God of Small Things for Uncannon: it was written by a woman of colour; it takes place in India; it is wholly out of my comfort zone.

First, let me tell you a little bit about this audiobook. The narration is a revelation, even if in the beginning I had to read it physically in parallel to manage the non-linear timeline of the story. The story is very fluid and mostly told from a child’s point of view, and Aysha Kala does a beautiful job of capturing the magic and innocence of youth in her performance. She also does a stellar job balancing the British accent for the narration and the Indian accent used for the dialogue. She also sings in a child-like voice at points, and it’s an absolute joy. Combining her light narration with the story’s heavy themes creates a unique experience that I thoroughly enjoyed.

On that note, this book needs to come with a content warning for just about everything. It’s all done incredibly tastefully and with a strange sense of poetic injustice. Still, you might want to be prepared for it, so I’d encourage you to look it up before picking it up if you’re sensitive about your literature.

This book is a family saga that takes place simultaneously in 1969 and 1993; this book is a history lesson on mid-20th century India; this book is a collection of memories and a child’s lullaby; this book is a study of trauma and its effects on those around it; this book is a hard look into patriarchal societies and casteism and child abuse and police brutality; this book is a Booker Prize winner and an almost-banned book; this book is a poem, and a mystery, and so many different things that I am having a hard time talking about it because I don’t want to spoil it. But most of all, this book is about how a series of small things culminate in a big tragedy, built by multiple instances where children are failed by the adults around them. It’s a hard book to read, but it might have been the most important book I have read this year. 

I’ve been re-writing this paragraph multiple times, trying to come up with something to tell you about this book, but I think I’m going to leave it here with a quote that broke my heart.

“When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

Bingo: UNCANNON

Just… so many cops

The Night Thief by Joy Ellis

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The Night Thief

I’ve been looking for a book with a landscape on the cover for such a long time. And since it’s October and I was in the mood for spooky reads, I thought I couldn’t go wrong with a thriller. How hard could it be to find? I’m honestly amazed that I didn’t give up on what appeared to be a fool’s errand. Alas, NetGalley came to my rescue.

The Night Thief is a procedural crime book, which will be out on November 18th, and I got a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. So here we go.

This book has an exciting starting point. In a cluster of small little English towns, a man is breaking into women’s houses in the middle of the night and scaring the hell out of them, but all he takes from their houses is a picture of a 10-year-old boy before leaving through the front door. And let me tell you, as a woman living alone, the thought of a creep breaking into my house and watching me sleep is terrifying.

So I thought I was going to enjoy this book. I was expecting to be kept in a simmering level of anxiety throughout the book – as it turns out, not so much. Also, it turns out that going into a book with incorrect expectations hinders my enjoyment of a book.

Let me make one thing clear: this book is not a thriller. I almost want to call it a cosy mystery, but it didn’t feel very cosy to me despite the small-town setting. Also, while a mystery was somewhat driving the plot forward, there was no sense of urgency, and it’s not at the heart of the story. I want to say this story is character-driven, but there are so many characters, and none of them is presented in much depth, nor does any of them undergo an actual character arc, so I’m a bit at a loss. It’s almost a slice of life narrative in the lives of the police department of Saltern-le-Fern.

If you go prepared for that, I guess this is a perfectly adequate book. I also found out after I finished the book that it’s the 8th in a series, so I think it would help if you’d read those before as it feels there are so many characters because they probably all already had their arcs in previous books. You’d probably care about most of the scenes if you cared about the characters, but I guess I’m not the target audience after all.

Here are some things that bugged me without giving too much away.

  1. There were too many characters, and it feels like all of them are cops (I can think of 8 off the top of my head), and I couldn’t tell them apart for most of the book.
  2. Because we are following so many characters, the narrative is meandering at best, making it hard to keep up any momentum or tension in the story.
  3. There is a secondary plotline that is clearly set up to be a red herring, and although the author did try to tie things together, it still felt disconnected to me at the end.
  4. I don’t quite know how to put this, but everyone was strangely polite in this book in a way that felt unrealistic. It felt a little like the tea-with-my-grandmother version of a crime novel: too sanitised, for lack of a better word.
  5. There is a lot of telling instead of showing at the end of the book. It ends with an epilogue-style last chapter where the characters are having dinner together and explaining what happened because we didn’t get enough information to fill in the gaps throughout the book.

But I guess that’s the point because this book is not about the mystery, the victims, or even the crime itself. It’s about the lives of these cops, but I think if that was the point, at least one of them deserved to be more 3-dimensional and have a better character arc.

Bingo: LANDSCAPE

I thought I didn’t care, but then I couldn’t stop crying

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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I don’t think I have ever read a book that was quite this hyped to me. I am actually looking forward to going back through the past reviews of this book here to see what cannonballers think of this book, because you guys always surprise me in a good way when I’m feeling conflicted – I never feel alone.

Anyway, this book is the current darling of booktube, bookstagram and booktok even though it’s already 10 years old by now, which I think is quite remarkable. I feel like social media tends to focus of new releases, so to see a book endure felt like a good omen to me. Plus, this fit right into the Mythic square on book bingo, and the cover was so pretty in the store that I just had to get it.

A disclaimer: although I have recently read Mythos by Stephen Fry, my knowledge of Greek mythology is weak at best. I have a mostly superficial knowledge of the main myths from primary school books and I am fairly certain we discussed the broad strokes of the Odyssey in high school 20 years ago, but I have most definitely never read the Illiad. All I knew of Achilles before embarking into this book was the pop culture reference translated into a distant memory of him being the invincible warrior who died because someone kicked his heel? Yes, that definitely sounds about right… ¬¬

I expected to be swept up by this book, and find myself unable to put it down. Conversely, I had to force myself to pick it up again and again over the almost two months it took me to finish (I even tried it on audio, which just didn’t work for me for whatever reason). But I decided I was going to force myself to finish it this weekend, even if I had to skim through the last 150 pages.

I don’t know what happened, and I need to talk it through, so I apologize but this will be full of spoilers.

Let me tell you a little bit about this story: funnily enough, The Song Of Achilles tells the story of Patroclus – a very young prince who is not interested in fighting, who accidently kills a boy who is trying to bully him and is exiled by his father to Phthia. There, he is expected to train and join the army, but instead finds himself infatuated with Achilles, the demi-God who is Peleus’ son, a boy so beautiful and perfect — fated to be the best warrior of Greece, but who is gentle and smart, and plays the lyre like an angel.

Achilles takes a liking to young Patroclus and claims him for his companion, and when he is sent to learn from Chiron the centaur, Patroclus runs and follows him. We watch the 2 of them grow up and fall in love and I am sure it’s all sweet and beautiful, I just couldn’t find it in myself to care.

When Helen is kidnapped and taken to Troy and all Greek heroes called to action to rescue her and Thetis (Achilles’ Goddess mother) hides her son in a foreign land and marries him off to a princess in secret, Patroclus searches until he finds him which I guess is again sweet, but this stop really lost me as a reader.

Apparently, the princess is pregnant with Achilles’ child, but there is this thing where she convinces Patroclus to sleep with her and the only reason I could see for that is that she wasn’t really pregnant and needed to be so that she could have a reason to claim the scheme with Thetis was true? But if that is the case, who is the father? I would understand the existence of this passage if it was Patroclus, because it’d make the ending even more bittersweet. But the child is then raised by Thetis under water, which I don’t think it’d have been possible if he’d been human, so I don’t understand why this was necessary. Maybe I missed the point altogether.

Regardless, Odysseus finds Achilles and Patroclus and carries them off to war. Achilles is aware of a prophecy that says he will not die while Hector (Troy’s best warrior) lives, so he makes sure not to kill him and the war drags on for 10 years. Achilles fights and is a bit of an arse about it. Patroclus becomes a medic and is compassionate of the terrible fate of women in misogynistic Greece and tries to save as many as he can through Achilles’ choice in “spoils of war”. But they’re still living a fairly happy life together, I guess.

The thing is, so much of this is about “pride” and “war” and I just can’t relate. I think wars are stupid and I couldn’t bring myself to care while soldiers revolted, and Gods got angered, and Achilles became a stubborn knobhead so worried about his own glory that he’d rather see everyone dead than to stop a massacre. So when Patroclus disguised himself as Achilles to try and lead the Phthian army to help and actually fought quite well before being killed by Hector, I still didn’t care too much.

When Achilles realized Patroclus was dead and went all out on a revenge-filled murderous rage and killed Hector, bringing on his own demise, all I thought was: you brought this all on yourself.

You know what killed me? This book is entirely told by Patroclus, and once he died his spirit continues to narrate the story, as he is bound to walk the earth by where he died until his body is burnt and his ashes are set to the Earth in his name. And Achilles asks to have their ashes mingled and buried together because regardless of how much of an dick he was, he did love Patroclus with all his heart.

But this is where we re-enter Pyrrhus into the story. This is Achilles’ (or Patroclus’) son, who comes into the war, after being raised by Thetis. He is the worst character is this book who comes in the last minute just to make everything worse. He is all the arrogance of a soul-less God mingled with the entitlement of a rich little adolescent boy. And he basically says that it’s too bad if his father’s ashes are mingled with this nobody-slave’s, but only Achilles’ name shall be written in the monument they’re erecting.

And this is heartbreaking. I’m tearing up again just writing this down. I think it’s Patroclus’ despair at this absolute erasure that really got to me. It destroyed me. Because Achilles is off to the underworld, and Patroclus, who really was the best of the Greeks, is doomed to wander Anatolia alone after all the Greeks have gone back home.

It is only after a long long time, long after Pyrrhus is long dead from being a douche, that Patroclus convinces Thetis, who always hated him, to write his name next to Achilles’, so he can move on to the underworld.

So am I left with a conundrum when trying to rate this book. Because this was really hard work, and I didn’t enjoy reading it for the most part. But I can’t stop thinking about those last 20-30 pages and it’s been quite a while since a book has gotten such a visceral reaction out of me. So while I wanted to give it 3 stars, I think I might have to raise it up.

Thank you for putting up with me and my rants 🙂

Bingo: MYTHIC

This is definitely not my brand of heroin…

Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer

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Midnight SunI think this officially marks the end of the week of finishing my bingo-inspired bad choices. Well let’s be honest, I can’t really blame bingo for this one.

Allow me to thoroughly embarrass myself for a moment:15 years ago, I was really into Twilight. I mean really into it, in a pre-ordering-the-books-as-they-came-out, getting-involved-in-fandom-on-LiveJournal,-reading-and-writing-fanfiction,-taking-the-train-to-Belgium-to-watch-the-movie-on-opening-weekend-because-it-took-a-couple-of-months-for-it-to-get-to-the-theater-in-France kind of way. And to be honest, I regret nothing. I made some pretty good friends during that time and even if I can acknowledge all the problematic things about it, I loved the book for what it was and what the fans made of it, and it was always going to hold a special place in my heart, even if I never felt the need to re-visit it.

So fast forward to 2020 when Stephenie Meyer decided to finally release the full Midnight Sun. My young and innocent self had read the leaked manuscript excerpt a decade ago, and I remember really enjoying it, so I bit the bullet and bought it. Then proceeded to completely ignore the existence of this book in my shelves for a year. I expected to feel nostalgic, but I am definitely not the same person I was 15 years ago, so I was kind of afraid this book would ruin it for me. And boy, was I right.

This book suffers from a dire lack of editing. It’s just so unnecessarily long.  I’m not joking: sitting at 658 pages, I see no reason why it should have gone over 350. It dragged. I thought it dragged, and as you can see from the length of my reviews, it’s not like I’m opposed to long-winded texts in general.

I don’t know, guys, I just feel like for the amount of words I was forced to read through, there was little to no new information that added anything to the story. I mean, I could be wrong, but I don’t think anyone who hasn’t read Twilight would pick up this book to start with, so technically we’re already working from a known tale. I expected this book to give me some new context, some more Cullen pre-Bella interaction, or at the very least, a new spin on the story. But that’s not what happens: we basically get the entirety of Twilight verbatim and nothing else (even the parts where Edward was not present for in Twilight get recounted to us because he’s eavesdropping on someone’s thoughts, or watching them through video ¬¬), and some long-winded tangents that add nothing to the story with a sprinkle of of just how much of a creep Edward really is. And by a sprinkle, imagine someone just added a full kilo of salt to your cup of soup. I mean yikes.

So really, if you’ve read Twilight, you really don’t need to read this. And if you haven’t, why would you want to?

If you’re also feeling nostalgic about simpler times when you were a young thing reading Twilight for the first time, go back and re-read it and allow yourself to ignore all the problematic parts of it because it is fun. Don’t pick this one up, it’ll ruin the entire franchise for you. 🙁

Bingo: OLD SERIES

Werther is a selfish, entitled, overly dramatic arsehole and I am glad he is dead

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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The sorrows of young werther

Content Warning for suicide.

I am kind of sad this book marks my first cannonball, but oh well…

When book bingo asked for a “White Whale”, I had a hard time picking a book. It’s just that I couldn’t think of anything I’d been meaning to read forever. And then I remembered the audiobook I bought back in 2016 when my bookclub read it, but I never did. It’d been sitting on my phone for over 5 years, and it was only a little over 5 hours, so I decided to give it a go.

Anyway, here’s a little background on this book. The Sorrows of Young Werther is Goethe’s debut novel, which he published when he was 24 years old, and it was apparently a hit. The preface to the book called it the Harry Potter of the 1700s, and even said Napoleon used to carry the book on his jacket pocket. However, it also appears to have caused a wave of suicides in Europe in the late 18th century aptly named “Werther Fever”, so it was banned after that. Goethe apparently grew to hate this book as well. The press seems to think it caused this suicide wave because it made suicide “fashionable” by making readers want to emulate the situations in the book, but I am certain it was because this book just sucked out people’s will to live.

So what else can I tell you about The Sorrows of Young Werther before I spoil the plot for you so you never have to read it? I made a list:

  1. The book is mainly told in an epistolary format, all letters from Werther mainly to the same friend, and he is a pompous, insufferable writer.
  2. The audiobook I have is terrible. There is some sad piano music in between the letters that makes it hard to hear the start and ending of them and the narrator who is clearly American tries to put on a terribly strong cartoon-ish German accent every once in a while and it’s horrendous.
  3. Werther is the most unlikeable character I have ever read. Bar none.

So on to the plot, and there shall be some spoilers from now on. So you might want to leave if you plan on reading this. Which you really shouldn’t.

Werther is a young man who thinks of himself as an artist and moved to the countryside to stay with his aunt(?), I think? I don’t remember, it’s not as if he ever mentions her again. From there he corresponds with a friend who apparently is in contact with his mother. He writes his friend almost every day to tell him about all he does in ridiculous levels of detail. He describes Nature and waxes poetic about art and painting and how nice the people on the countryside are, being careful to label every interaction with those below his station.

He eventually meets Charlotte, a young woman who is engaged to another man whom she loves deeply, and who is like a mother to her 8 siblings. Werther falls madly in love and strikes a friendship with her and basically talks of nothing else for months. He’s also kind of an arsehole because he’s so happy he’s verbally attacking people for being in a bad mood, the hypocritical douchebag.

Plus there’s this whole thing about him kissing the children, which did not age well, and prompts Charlotte to remind Werther she’s engaged and put some distance between them. Werther gets hopelessly depressed, then throws a tantrum and leaves without saying goodbye to get a job and finally do something productive with his life. And he fails miserably. I mean, newsflash: about 99% of us don’t like our jobs either, but we somehow still manage to go to work everyday without whinging about it constantly.

Long story short, he doesn’t even last 4 months before quitting and going off with a prince who took a fancy to him. And there is this one line where he writes his mother about not needing to send him the money he required  because the prince gifted him cash which just made me extremely mad. You’re an adult man – you should not be living on mummy’ dime. Ugh.

Anyway, at some point while I was getting extremely annoyed and worked up he hears Charlotte has gotten married and goes back and becomes a friend of the family while not-so-secretly stalking her. He basically goes to see her and the children everyday and it’s just creepy. He just feels like he’s entitled to her and it’s so fucking uncomfortable to read. The book tries to paint it as if she is also torn between her love for her husband and her brotherly affection for Werther, but I call bullshit on that.

At this point we’re getting a narration as well as the increasingly incoherent letters. I mean, the guy has gone completely off the rails until he finally snaps and assaults her.  She cannot do anything about it because it is 1774, but she asks him not to visit until her husband is back on Christmas Eve. Werther takes this as a personal slight and basically decides to take revenge by killing himself and having her receive a letter where he basically blames her for his death on Christmas eve. Even in the letter, he revels on the sadness he expects her to feel because of his death.

Honestly, he’s just an arsehole who blames everyone else for his perceived misfortunes and I just wished he had died earlier, possibly from an infant illness so I never had to hear from him to begin with.  I’m giving this 2 stars because Goethe did write beautifully, and because I enjoyed writing this review, but my enjoyment of this story was zero.

Bingo: WHITE WHALE

…and people say you can’t judge a book by its cover

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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The Vanishing Half

Look at how pretty this book is.

I am serious: take a minute to ignore the Lego boxes hiding behind the books and truly appreciate how absolutely gorgeous the Waterstones exclusive edition of the Vanishing Half is. I will be honest, I bought this book for the purely superficial reason that it would look gorgeous on my shelf, and it delivered (don’t even get me started on the gorgeous purple hardcover underneath the dust jacket or I might never actually tell you anything about the book itself).

This is the proof that you can indeed judge books by their covers, and I am so happy with the joy this particular frivolous purchase brought me, because not only is the book beautiful, but so is the story. But I digress.

The Vanishing Half is a strange book to explain because while the reading experience is wonderful, and the character work absolutely amazing, not much actually happens in the book. It’s a generational family tale about twin sisters, black but white-passing, who run away from home in their teens. I don’t want to give too much away because as I said, there’s not much going on in the first place. But I will try.

Stella and Desiree have grown up in Mallard, a black town in the American South whose inhabitants have been “lightening” themselves through the generations. 10 years after running away together, but not having heard from her sister in almost as long, Desiree returns to Mallard with her much darker daughter Jude, running away from her abusive husband. Jude grows up and moves to California for college, where she eventually comes face to face with her mother’s face.

This book is a beautiful character study. It discusses issues of race over time and from a perspective I hadn’t considered before, but it also goes well beyond that. There is beautiful trans representation as well, which I was really pleasantly surprised about, and the way the author contrasted the experiences of “passing as white while hiding who you really are” and “passing as a cis-man so there’s no need to hide who you really are” was superb.

All in all, it’s a slow-paced family chronicle which is not usually my jam, but I really enjoyed this. I can’t say the ending was quite satisfying, but it rang true. Overall a somewhat sad, thought-provoking read. I’d rate it a 4.5, but I’m rounding up.

Bingo: SHELFIE



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