Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About Tracy

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40-something psychologist living with a husband, preschooler, and 2 cats. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Tracy's Quick Questions interview.)

Tracy's Reviews:

Retelling of an Epic Hindu Poem

Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel

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I found this retelling of the epic Hindu poem The Ramayana quite engaging. Vaishnavi Patel is trying to explore what led to the actions Kaikeyi took in that poem by adding nuance and a feminist flair, with varying degrees of success. While I haven’t read the original, I looked up enough to know that Kaikeyi plays an important role but not a large one in the original story. In this version, we witness her childhood as the neglected princess among several princes who are more […]

Lovely Relationship Between Grandmother and Granddaughter

The Summer Book by Tove Jannson, translated by Thomas Teal

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This was a lovely little book that’s a quick read and also occasionally, and unexpectedly, made me laugh out loud. Translated from Finnish, it’s the story of young Sophia and her grandmother, told in vignette form. They spend their summers on one of the many Finnish islands. Sophia’s father is there in a limited way; the focus is on Sophia and her grandmother as they explore the island and talk to each other. There are also symbolic references to the death of Sophia’s mother, which […]

Underwhelming and Emotionally Manipulative

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

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I had high expectations for this book and was significantly underwhelmed by the execution. The main character is Zelu, a paraplegic Nigerian-American writer. Not long after the book starts, she loses her job, and her literary fiction novel is rejected yet again. She decides to write a new book, a science fiction novel that becomes a runaway success. Chapters of that book, entitled Rusted Robots, are interspersed with chapters of the main novel. Where do I start? The overall description of the novel appealed to me, […]

Interesting Concept, Would Have Loved Even More

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

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If you’re in the mood for a YA portal fantasy with ace and trans rep, this might be for you. Although to be fair, it’s maybe more portal-adjacent because we don’t actively spend time in those other words. In this first book in the Wayward Children series, we learn that Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children is a sanctuary for children who visited other worlds but for some reason left or were rejected from them. Their families don’t believe they traveled anywhere, and Eleanor takes them […]

In Which Grad School is Worse Than Hell

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

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I was mildly apprehensive about reading this because mixed audience reviews came out after I preordered it, but it was great. Kuang does character psychology very well, and that stood out more than anything else. Except for one chapter, the POV character is Alice, graduate student in Analytical Magick at Cambridge. When her piece-of-work advisor Jacob Grimes dies in an accident she blames herself for, she goes to Hell to fetch him—not out of selflessness but because she needs him to finish her degree. Her […]

Intersectionality in the 1950s

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

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This coming-of-age novel showcases the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality against the recurring backdrop of McCarthyism. It appears to have been meticulously researched, which I appreciate. The novel centers on Lily Hu during the first half of her senior year in high school. She becomes closer to her classmate Kath while starting to discover her sexuality. Meanwhile, there are some concerns about the government’s interest in her father. The plot will likely resonate with readers of all ages, but especially YA readers who tend to […]



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