Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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On the bonnie banks of the Charles River

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

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Bless me, cannonballers, for I have sinned – it’s been months since my last review. But now that it’s January, I find myself back on my bullshit here, attempting a cannonball for the 4th time. After a few half-starts on New Year’s Day, I just devoured Lily King’s Writers & Lovers.  Casey Peabody is a writer barely making ends meet by waiting tables in 1997 Cambridge, Mass. I struggle to sum up the book’s action. It was one of the reasons why it took me […]

“Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?”

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

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I struggle with how to write this review, not wanting to spoil the three novels that preceded it (which I, incidentally, recommend higher than this last one). The Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of a Lost Child) center around two girls, magnetically close friends (by which I mean they both attract and repel one another), growing up in postwar Naples. Lila (Rafaella) is an object of fascination and (in […]

“For the old Kentucky home far away”

The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

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I had skipped Jojo Moyes’ previous outings and did not immediately recognize the author without her telltale font when I selected this for my Book of the Month club pick. The Giver of Stars is about the Kentucky pack horse librarians who, through a grant during the Great Depression, brought books and reading materials to the more isolated regions of eastern Kentucky. The story centers on Alice, an Englishwoman who is wooed by a Kentuckian abroad and brought back to live with him and his […]

“You’ll probably find one of those, ‘I like art’-type girls”

A Paris All Your Own by Eleanor Brown

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Of all the cities in the world to visit, none is as pressure-filled as Paris (from my vantage point, at least). I’m heading there for a weekend and it’s been a decade since I last went so I picked up this collection of essays, promising “Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light.” I love the concept of this and I have the NYC-equivalents on my TR list (Goodbye to All That & Can’t Say Goodbye). I didn’t necessarily expect a useful travelogue but I […]

A young heart and an antique soul

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

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I started Jenny Slate’s collection of essays on the morning of New Year’s Day on my way to meet my friend for one of those polarizing NYC boutique fitness classes. The nature of the book makes it easy to fly through vignettes and I was not having a great feeling about it as I got off the subway. I couldn’t believe I was going to start out the new year with a DNF. I was already trying to justify it in my head, “Perhaps 2020 […]

“Like egrets, like terns, like starlings”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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I am reluctant to share the plot details of All the Light We Cannot See for fear of spoiling the experience that is unspooling this beautiful novel. This is a dual narrative, switching back and forth between a young man in Germany and a young woman in France during WWII. Werner, a brilliant orphan with hair as white as schnee, is a radio-repairing engineering genius who finds himself in the German army while Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, flees occupied Paris with her beloved father […]



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