Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Diary of a Mad Tradwife

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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First and foremost, we must give credit where credit is due. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear has a premise that must have other authors fuming with jealousy. Her protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, is a housewife and mother on a remote ranch who posts “tradwife” content on social media, pretending to be the ideal American mother while playing down the fact that she has two nannies and a lot of family money from her in-laws to help. One day, she wakes up in what feels like an alternate […]

To Be Young, Bewildered, and Black

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

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Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry, whose famous aphorism popped into my head more than once while I was reading The Wilderness.  Flournoy has given us a portrait of young Black women’s struggle to make meaning, starting in their twenties and progressing to middle age. These women are, indeed, gifted in many ways, but it doesn’t spare them the journey we all take from youth to maturity. Their Blackness means the challenges are different, and sometimes greater. “Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness” by mypubliclands is licensed under CC BY […]

Gossip, Judgement and Destruction – Read this Book

Good People by Patmeena Sarit

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Are we not all outsiders to another person’s life?   Mesmerizing Debut Novel  The novel’s unique structure lacks traditional chapters, paragraphs or narrator. Instead there are 1-2 page personal accounts, giving a 360 degree view of the leadup and the aftermath of one family’s tragedy. I had read about one-third of the book before even learning how somebody died but yet still did not know who had died. There are dozens of unreliable narrators with differing degrees of closeness. Sympathetic words mask superiority, scorn, prejudice […]

The (No Spoilers) Spoils of Poynton

The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James

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The Spoils of Poynton … should have been a short story rather than a novel. One can (almost) see the whole plot in the first few chapters. The simple set-up is this – Mrs. Gereth has lovingly and carefully collected art and antiques her entire adult married life with her husband. After his death it is discovered that Mr. Gereth has bequeathed the whole kit and caboodle, along with the stately home she has lived in her entire married life, to their only son Owen, […]

Rising Tides

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

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Dominic Salt and his three children (teenagers Raff and Fen, and their nine-year-old brother Orly) are the last living people on Shearwater Island. Dominic is the caretaker for a research lab and a seed bank housing emergency reserves of seeds for every plant species on Earth, in case of apocalypse. It’s not an idle threat in the world of Charlotte McConaghy’s novel. The waters, always rough, have lately been rising, and are threatening to swallow the island entirely. The lab has been shuttered and the […]

Second Read, First Listen

Long Island by Colm Toibin

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I read this book a couple of years ago when it was published, but I wanted to give the audiobook a listen after finding out it was done by Jessie Buckley, an actress whose voice I find very appealing. Last year I did a similar thing with Toibin’s Brooklyn, listening to the new edition of the audiobook narrated by Saoirse Ronan. What won’t I do for talented and lovely Irish women? Brooklyn is one of my favorite novels, and listening to it in Ronan’s voice […]



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