Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


A multi-generational exploration of Black experience from the early days of the slave trade through modern day.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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CBR 15 Bingo: Africa – The book begins, ends, and half of it takes place in Africa. Yaa Gyasi begins Homegoing with a pair of sisters (Effia Otcher and Esi Asare) separated at birth at the height of the African slave trade.  One sister, Effia, is raised and married off to a white Englishman on the Gold Coast.  The other sister, Esi, stays in a tribal African village.  The story covers seven generations. Each chapter is a new person advancing down the timeline and alternates between […]

Picture books are Fun

Indigo Dreaming by Dinah Johnson

Not Quite Narwhal and Friends: Weather Together by Jessie Sima

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  cbr15bingo Africa: Indigo dreaming has the African connection I enjoy doing picture book reviews and doing a round-up review of a few titles at once. The thing with picture books is that they are short. So, they are easy to read. And yet, they can be packed from cover to cover with amazing goodies. Just sometimes that does not lend itself to a regulation review word count. The below titles are perfect for most people, yet different enough and varied in age ranges that […]

Trudging through Drudgery

The Ritual by Mo Hayder

Magnus by Arjen Lubach

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The Ritual (Mo Hayder) ***½ When it comes to thrillers and crime fiction, I’m stuck in a quandary in the sense that I usually like the idea better than the execution. My main problem is that so many books within the genre seem so badly written: the characters are flat, the prose is hokey and the authors always seem to want to outdo each other by coming up with either the goriest or the most outlandish plots. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but […]

January 2022 Leftovers

Hit Parade by Lawrence Block

Sex Criminals, Volume 1: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky

Devils In Exile by Chuck Hogan

Ex Machina, The Deluxe Edition: Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan

A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny

Munich by Robert Harris

Shella by Andrew Vachss

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

The Accomplice by Lisa Lutz

No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfeld

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

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My resolution for Cannonball Read in 2022 is to only write reviews where I feel like I have much to say and then dump the others in a singular post at the end of the month to track how much I’ve read. This’ll spare me from writing 250+ words about books that I can’t even think of a hundred for. So… Hit Parade **** I enjoy these books and while this is the one I maybe enjoyed the least (did EVERY story need cutaway conversations with […]

This isn’t your father’s Jungle Book…..

Sengi and Tembo by G. Falco

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FYI: I have some not fort his book images becaue I can and I like them! If Animal Farm and A Tale of Two Cities created a book together, the graphic novel Sengi and Tembo by G. Falco (or Giuseppe Falco) probably would be the results. Rebellion, status quo, life, and the ultimate equalizer death all come together in a dark, somewhat comedic commentary on not only how things should be but can become. Sengi is a young mouse that quickly learns the dangers of […]

A monumental achievement that mostly worked like I thought it would

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

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I was shocked to see that this book had only been reviewed one time for Cannonball Read. My cultural frame of reference for this show is that it came out before my time, was one of the biggest shows in the history of television. The show premiered in January of 1977 and Part I garnered a 40.5 share. The show was aired over the course of a single week because CBS was afraid it was going to be a bust, and preferred one bad week […]



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