Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Double Blind and Spook Country

Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn

Spook Country by William Gibson

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Double Blind – 2/5 Sometimes I read a book and I wish I listened to the audiobook. Not that I always feel this way, but throughout this book I kept feeling I might give it a better shrift if I had listened to it. Reading it though, I felt my experience of it to be quite anemic and my reaction to the book was lukewarm at the best and slightly antagonistic at worse when it came to to ways in which St Aubyn handled some […]

“Obviously She Was a Person to Whom Things Happened”

National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

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I remember reading National Velvet multiple times when I was younger. I was one of those horse crazy girls – show me a book about a horse and I’d read it. I recently decided to give it a re-read, and I think it holds up pretty well. The main character is Velvet Brown, youngest (age 14) daughter of a butcher father and a mother who had famously swum the Channel years before. Velvet has a quirky imagination that is tolerated and even supported by the […]

Chocolate, Cross-dressing, Murder, and More!

The Spanish Daughter by Lorena Hughes

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Puri and her husband Cristóbal are on their way to Ecuador, where Puri is to claim a chocolate plantation that has been left to her, when her husband is murdered by the assassin sent for her. Determined to avenge him, Puri assumes Cristóbal’s identity and goes to the plantation, where a trio of secret siblings is but the first of the surprises… I was immediately intrigued by this book, because I’d never read anything with such a plot. Yet despite the intricacy of the premise, […]

Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope-or whom he gives it to?

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

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Harlem Shuffle was billed as a heist book, a caper. And it certainly has heists, and even a caper or two, but reducing the whole book to that label ignores that Harlem Shuffle is something a bit more complex. Ray Carney is a furniture salesman in Harlem in the late 1950s. He is moderately successful, still worried about making rent. He dreams of a bigger apartment for his growing family. He is also, we soon learn, not entirely on the up-and-up. In a description reminiscent […]

Yo’ Ho Hum and a bottle of Root Beer at the bottom of the ocean

The Aquanaut: A Graphic Novel by Dan Santat

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The Aquanaut: A Graphic Novel is a cute story with a theme about environmentalism, animal conservation and family. The story is when a handful of sea creatures find a surprise at the bottom of the ocean, it leads them on an adventure with a young girl and her uncle. A Sea-World like park is filled with the research and animals found by Sophia’s father (lost at sea several years ago) and her uncle. A handful of critters from the actual ocean, have banded together to […]

Even the Dog Can’t Save It

Bear Witness by Lark O Jensen

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Stacie is a tour guide, introducing people to Alaskan wildlife from a boat. When a man vanishes from the tour, she thinks he’s stowed away to cause trouble. But when his body is discovered out amid the ice floes, she realizes that there is something far worse at play. I really wanted to like this book. The premise sounds so cool and so eerie, the idea of a body bobbing out in the frigid Alaskan waters. Unfortunately the story goes downhill from there. My main […]



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