Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Facts, fiction, and women’s work

The Daring Ladies of Lowell: A Novel by Kate Alcott

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Cbr13bingo Machinery The Daring Ladies of Lowell is  a work of historical fiction set in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1832-33. In addition to including much historical fact about women’s working conditions and life at the mill, it also involves a love story and a murder mystery taken from real life.  Kate Alcott (pen name for Patricia O’Brien) takes her readers into the world of her fictional heroine Alice Barrow as she begins work at the mill, gets to know her fellow workers in […]

Purity – Jonathan Franzen (2015)

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

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I don’t recall as much about Freedom as I do The Corrections, but this book, the up until soon most recent Jonathan Franzen indulges in some of Franzen’s best and worst habits. There’s whole sections of this book that read like the “Chip in Eastern Europe” section of the Corrections writ large. I mention that because I know several people who love that book and hate that part. One of my most discerning professors held that opinion. The story here is Great Expectations. Purity does […]

playing catch-up while playing bingo!

Kink: Stories by R. O. Kwon, Garth Greenwell

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices by Swapna Krishna, Jenn Northington

Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

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Hey y’all- long time, no read! I took some time off from reviewing while on vacation, then let vacation mind take over all of my non-work mind and found myself in a reviewing hole. Then, work swallowed me whole. I started writing this on August 9th. Just finishing it now on the 29th-Cait Also, I haven’t been reading reviews here either, so be prepared for a wave of comments coming your way! Good news: I truly enjoyed all seven of these books. One was a […]

With Artificial Friends Like These

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Kazuo Ishiguro doesn’t make things easy for himself. At least in the books of his that I’ve read, he seems determined to burden himself with the most limited narrator through which to tell his stories. Of course, that also creates a lot of work for the reader, who has to piece together what’s really going on from just the scraps given to them by the narrator’s perspective. The title character of Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro’s eighth and newest novel, is an Artificial Friend (“AF” […]

Death becomes her

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Casiopea Tun is a poor relative. She and her mother were taken in by her grandfather when her father died, and since then she has been treated appallingly, more like a lowly servant than a family member. In Mexico in the 1920s, her options are limited but she dreams of escaping her relatives and the small town she’s living in and live The Life: cars, dances, fancy dresses and swims in the ocean. One day, when she’s alone in the house, she opens a chest […]

“You know who that bird reminds me of? You.” Her expression changed, and he didn’t know what he’d said wrong. Then he saw that the change was caused by Dicey trying to hold back laughter. “I was thinking how much it was like you.”

A Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voigt

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In One Word: Redemptive Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Old Series So far, Jeff is a boy at school, who plays guitar and sings and has begrudgingly caught Dicey’s eye. This book takes us back in time in Jeff’s story, and we learn how he and his father came to live in Crisfield. It was a really interesting take on the series, to focus on Jeff (who we just met in the second book, and has so far been of periphery interest to Dicey the main […]



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