Cannonball Read 10

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Valyruh

64-year-old book lover and mother of an English/lit teacher and a would-be film/tv screenwriter. Need more be said?

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Valyruh's Reviews:

Courtroom thriller without the usual Lescroart oomph!

The Fall by John Lescroart

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Neither as meaty nor as finely drawn as Lescroart’s earlier and more emotionally complex thrillers, The Fall nonetheless fits the bill for a combination murder mystery/courtroom drama that dovetails with this country’s soaring racial tensions between police and African-Americans. The Fall deals with the first major legal case of Rebecca (“The Beck”) Hardy, daughter of Lescroart’s serial hero Dismas Hardy. The Beck is now an associate in Hardy’s law firm and gets her first chance at a murder trial in defense of one Greg Treadway, a sympathetic young man who is working as an advocate for kids in the foster […]

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7/31/2015 's CBR7 Review No:52 |

A Wilderness Trek into Self-Discovery

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

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This book is a touching personal memoir with profound lessons for some among us. Cheryl became a lost soul when her mother died at an early age and her family disintegrated. Even Cheryl’s loving husband couldn’t save her from self-destructing as she plunged into heroin addiction and sexual escapades to escape from her pain. That is when the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) unexpectedly called her name, and set her on a grueling path to self-knowledge.   The PCT is a west coast hiking trail that extends through the deserts, mountains and wilderness from Mexico to Canada, and is rarely undertaken […]

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7/29/2015 's CBR7 Review No:51 |

A fun but mostly disappointing sequel to Gone Baby Gone

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

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This sequel to the fabulous Gone Baby Gone was fun, but not up to its more famous predecessor. Baby Amanda is grown up and now a smart and precocious teen with an agenda all her own. Our favorite detective pair Patrick and Angie have gotten past the crisis of conscience that split them up 12 years earlier over Amanda’s earlier fate, and are now married with a daughter of their own, a more cautious approach to life, and a step away from bankruptcy. When Amanda –and a friend– goes missing, a stricken Patrick gives up a potential dream job to […]

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7/16/2015 's CBR7 Review No:50 |

Great tell-it-like-it-is legal tale with just the right mix of humor and courtroom hijinx

The Litigators by John Grisham

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A late work that hadn’t caught my eye before, The Litigators brought me hurtling back into the Grisham fold. This book offers a fast-moving and painfully realistic story about mass tort litigation, along with a satisfying array of characters, and just enough laugh-out-loud moments and real-life horror stories to keep those pages turning til the end. The story opens just as young corporate lawyer David Zinc is having a full-scale panic attack on the way to his 93rd floor cubicle where he does mind-numbing financial reviews all day and gets to bill vast fees for his firm. He never gets […]

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7/15/2015 's CBR7 Review No:49 |

An unsuccessful glimpse inside the mind of a killer

Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo

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 Nesbo steps away from his standard Norwegian detective fare with this slim new novel that starts and ends with the blood of a murdered man soaking into the snow. Blood on Snow is written from the viewpoint of a mob “fixer,” a contract killer named Olav who is kept on the payroll of Oslo’s biggest crime boss to take care of problems that his boss doesn’t want to think about. These problems range from snitches to competitors to an unfaithful wife. And until Olav catches a glimpse of the wife, he has no problem shooting people at point-blank range or […]

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7/2/2015 's CBR7 Review No:48 |

Jack Reacher in Europe, with an unexpected twist

Personal by Lee Child

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While I won’t claim it’s his best, or even that great, I found this latest (19th) Jack Reacher story an intriguing enough premise, a rapid page-turner (including the ballistics details which others found boring but which I enjoyed), a truly scary bad guy, and an unexpected punch-to-the-gut ending.   Someone has taken a long-distance shot at the French president, but special bullet-proof glass protected him from assassination. The CIA decides, along with Europe’s top intelligence agencies, that this was just a practice run aimed at the real target: the upcoming G8 meeting of the world’s top heads of state in […]

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7/1/2015 's CBR7 Review No:47 |

On Child Abuse and Redemption

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

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I wouldn’t call this the best novel Toni Morrison has ever written, but given how high she has set the bar, God Help The Child is still a powerful read that I would highly recommend.  It is about the abuse of children, and about damaged adults. It is full of Morrison’s characteristically spare but lyrical prose and disconcerting magical realism. It is full of pain and rage, but also redemption and resolution. Her main character is a little girl named Mary Lou, born with “blue-black” skin to a horrified light-skinned mother who would give her away if she could get away […]

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6/30/2015 's CBR7 Review No:46 |

A cautionary tale of middle-class entropy

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

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My first response to this book, published in 1959, was to praise it as an early contribution to what was soon to be launched as the modern-day feminist movement, as it is a penetrating study of a woman trapped by her own outdated middle-class conventions. But then I realized that it would do this book an injustice to define it so narrowly, as Connell in his understated way brilliantly strips bare the racist, classist, xenophobic and intolerant mindset that afflicted much of middle and upper-class America in the 1930s and 40s, and he does so in a manner that somehow […]

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6/29/2015 's CBR7 Review No:45 |


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