Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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In one word: Grieving Cannonball Read Bingo: Uncannon I picked this for uncannon because Gyasi is giving new life to a story that we’ve seen many times over from the Eurocentric white perspective. There have been plenty of books about drug addiction (even specifically about Oxycontin and the havoc it is wreaking in America), mental illness, the crossroads of science and religion in academia, and an overachieving character trying to fix her heart by using her head. She is taking very familiar tropes and given […]

“This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves.”

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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I am finally getting around to read my second Cannonball Read book exchange gift book this year from Bonnie (thanks Bonnie!) I don’t know what took me so dang long because I loved the first book she gave me, Red White and Royal Blue, and it wasn’t even on my radar to read, and neither was Homegoing and I should have known that Bonnie knows her book business and BOY. DOES. SHE. Homegoing is definitely in my top books of the year, and one I’m […]

3/4 of a Good Book (Belated Bingo – Yellow)

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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This book was a journey for me, a loooong road from start to finish. A friend sent it to me in the mail, having not finished it, but thinking I would like to read it. Her disclaimer was that she was reading it while pregnant and due to something that happened to a pregnant woman wasn’t able to read on. I mean, a book about a civil war is going to be a tough read for anyone, but certainly for an expectant mother possibly a […]

The Book of the Phoenix-a great work by a new favorite author

The Book of the Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor

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I first heard of the works of Nnedi Okorafor through a friend who attended a writing workshop with her many years ago but this is the first work of hers that I have read. And I loved it but it is a complicated, dense work. The story begins in Africa. The world has been devastated by some calamity and this older man is seeking shelter to avoid an unusual storm. In a cave, he finds computers that provide him with a recording of the woman […]

Less thriller, more meditation

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

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American Spy opens with a literal bang, the way most spy novels do. But then it becomes something different – more of a memoir, more of a reckoning with the past that led to the opening shot. Marie, the titular spy, is the lone black female employee in her FBI field office. Attacked in her home, she flees New York to her mother’s country of Martinique; meanwhile, she reflects on her girlhood with her sister, now deceased, and her time as a spy during the […]

Watch out, boy, she’ll chew you up

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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#CBR11 Bingo: Pajiba (reviewed by Kayleigh here) (Would also work for “Award winner”, “Own voices”, “Listicle”, “Cannonballer Says”, and possibly, “Far and Away”) Official book description: Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps […]



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