Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Unpainted Huffhines

CBR17 Participant
CBR18 Participant

I love to read, one of the many personality traits I've inherited from my dad. My family lost him to cancer in September 2021.

Unpainted Huffhines's Reviews:

Well, that escalated….

Havoc by Christopher Bollen

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… not quickly. But once it gets going, boy howdy. CW: animal death, sexual abuse Christopher Bollen’s Havoc is narrated by octogenarian widow Maggie Burkhardt, who has taken up more or less permanent residence in a once grand, now kind of rundown hotel in Luxor, Egypt at the height of the COVID pandemic. Maggie is the self-appointed grande dame of the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel: she knows all of the other guests and has ingratiated herself with the staff, especially the kindly concierge Ahmed, who allows Maggie […]

The Horror of History

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

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What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I am the worst dream America ever had. (163) Much of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is in the vein of a lot of his work: a horror novel that is concerned with Native identity and its history in America. In the SGJ books I’ve read (The Only Good Indians, the Indian Lake trilogy, I Was a Teenage Slasher), that Native identity is a contemporary one. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, on the other hand, tackles a real-life […]

Water, Fire, and Blood

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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“White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, choose they house. They get to make black babies, then disappear into thin air like wasn’t never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell ’em; now they just send ’em to prison like they did my daddy, so that they can’t be with they kids.” Homegoing by […]

Evil Woman

Old Soul by Susan Barker

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Old Soul by Susan Barker is a terrifying novel about a malevolent, otherworldly force that is transmitted to victims via a mysterious, shapeshifting woman over decades and centuries. I am not usually someone who finds supernatural themes all that convincingly scary, but Old Soul really got me. As the jacket blurb states, Jake and Mariko meet by chance and discover that they have lost a friend and family member respectively. Both Lena (Jake’s friend) and Hiroji (Mariko’s twin brother) act erratically, cruelly, and dangerously after […]

Family Traditions

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister

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Set in West Virginia (everyone’s favorite state for backwoods traditions, it seems), The Bog Wife details a tradition held by the Haddesley family through generations. It goes something like this: when the family patriarch is dying, he must be sacrificed to the bog. His entire family must carry him to the bog on a wood plank and leave him. After his body is subsumed by the bog, the eldest son must return naked and use a dowsing rod to summon a bog wife. This bog […]

Dreams of a Misogynist

Dream Girl by Laura Lippman

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Dream Girl is the fourth Laura Lippman book I’ve read after Lady in the Lake, Prom Mom, and Sunburn. DG is now up there with Prom Mom as my favorite so far, not least because the female characters get their revenge on the men who have wronged them. Dream Girl is the story of Gerry Andersen, a successful writer who has moved to Baltimore from NYC to care for his dementia-ridden mother, who then suddenly dies as Gerry is moving into his new apartment. Lippman, […]



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