Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

“We are burning and we are falling / and we are stuck”

New Arcana by Jessica Traynor

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CBR 18 Bingo: FRIENDS Back in mid-March, I was like, “Life is leveling out! I can write reviews again!” And then my beloved 16-year-old dog, not two weeks later, passed away. And I did not write any reviews, obviously. I’m not going to tempt the fates again by suggesting life is leveling out. Life is happening. Here I am. I’ve been reading books all this time, and I want to write about them again. Let’s see if I can do it. I started Jessica Traynor’s New […]

A murder mystery around a mythical history

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

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It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed. Very odd, isn’t it. […]

“a hobbastyu was both a turbulent sea and a great difficulty, or dilemma”

Clear by Carys Davies

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The idea of a historical fiction novel that sends you repeatedly running to Wikipedia usually sounds like a hefty tome, some kind of sweeping epic like Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. But Carys Davies’s Clear is a tiny little jewel box of a novel, not even 200 pages long (or just a hair over three hours for the audiobook I listened to). But Davies takes you into the Scottish clearances, the 1843 schism in the Scottish Presbyterian church, Scots dialect, the dying Norse-derived languages of the northernmost […]

an overly-rosy wintry fairy tale

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

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The description of The Snow Child kinda intrigued me when it first came out, and I do love novels that put a fresh spin on old fairy tales. Then a friend mentioned loving it, so I thought, why not, and  put it on my digital library holds, because it’d be fine as a dog-walking read, probably. The novel focuses on an older couple, Jack and Mabel, who moved to Alaska and are homesteading there in the 1910s following heartbreaks in their former life on the East […]

“Nothing makes sense until it makes sense in the body”

Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant

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National poetry month demands some poetry reviews, and fortunately there’s no shortage of good poetry to engage with. Jason Allen-Paisant won last year’s T.S. Eliot Prize for his second collection, Self-Portrait As Othello. Allen-Paisant is originally from Jamaica, but also studied in Paris and earned his PhD in medieval literature at Oxford, and his familiarity with moving through these more rarefied, majority-white spaces in Europe prompts, in part, the identification with the figure of Othello that forms the center of this collection. Self-Portrait As Othello really […]

Augustine and his women

Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions by Kate Cooper

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Kate Cooper’s Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions came to my attention via an article on the shortlist for the 2023 Cundill History Prize. (BTW, that’s a good-looking group of books, if you’re a history nerd.) I teach Augustine’s Confessions every spring, but always find it a bit of hard going in a literature class, so anything that might help me out, I try to look at. (Last spring it was Natalie Carnes’s Motherhood: A Confession which is also fantastic.) Cooper’s central idea […]



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