Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About zinka

CBR13 participantCBR12 participant

I failed miserably at my first cannonball (the reviewing part, not the reading part) so I'm trying again. I've also roped my siblings into the game. Currently living in Florida as an artist, mom, gallery/community arts space operator, and person that says yes to too much probably.

zinka's Reviews:

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Tom Robbins re-reads #1: Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins

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I discovered Tom Robbins on my mom’s bookshelf when I was in High School. A fan herself, she had an assortment of his novels and I devoured, quickly, Even Cowgirls get the Blues followed by the rest of her collection. Cowgirls has remained my favorite of his novels, but I’ve always felt that Skinny Legs and All seemed more important, somehow more serious and more fantastical at the same time, and I always felt like I had learned something from it even if I couldn’t […]

Memory and trauma and loss and family

Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey

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Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey, is a memoir where Trethewey tells the stories of her childhood homes, growing up as a child of a black mother and white father, the shift in her relationship to her mother, and, eventually, her mother’s murder while Trethewey was still a young woman. This is the core of the book, but it really is so much more than that. A relatively short read, Memorial Drive is captivating and visceral. At its length, I would have expected to read the […]

“What if you have a child, and that child wishes with every bone in her body that she’d never been born?”

Breasts and Eggs by Meiko Kawakami

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The inside cover of Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is extremely misleading. I don’t think I usually put a lot of faith in the short descriptions that live on the insides or backs of books, so I guess normally this wouldn’t have bothered me, but I received Breasts and Eggs as a gift and knew only one thing about it when I unwrapped it: the book had been featured on a very short list of recent stellar stories that contained asexual protagonists. So maybe that’s […]

It’s just so good and I really need to know if the other book deserved that prize too

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

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In Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo traces the impacts of identity, racism, xenophobia, feminism, slavery, classism, and so much more through many generations of British women of color who are not tied to each other only by blood but rather through encounters and relationships, some briefer than others. Each of these women has a different history and understanding of their relationship to the world that greatly affects how they view themselves and others around them. Each of their stories comes beautifully up against conflict where […]

When adventures are actually hard stuff and the characters are made all the better for it

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss

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I love it when I come across fiction of the fantasy and science fiction variety that I can and want to devour ravenously. This happened in college when I discovered Octavia Butler and then read everything she’d ever written in a week and last year when a friend introduced me to N.K. Jemisin and spent several months reading two of her series. This only ever happens with fiction for me and I think I may be doing the same with Goss, albeit a bit slower […]



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