Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Lost Children, Almost Forgotten History

Keeper of Lost Children by Sadeqa Johnson

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I have never read this author before but I was intrigued by the premise when I saw this on a few “Anticipated 2026 Releases” lists. The novel follows three different characters with different starting points, and naturally the stories converge. Ozzie is an African American soldier in Germany in 1948 – right when Truman passes the order to desegregate the military. Ethel Gathers is on an accompanied tour to Germany as her husband’s dependent in 1951. She is one of the few Black officers’ wives […]

The Devil’s Attempt at Playing Guardian Angel

The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne

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I picked this one up because I thought the premise of the Devil interacting with a woman and all her descendants was an interesting way to frame an intergenerational family story. While this is follows eight generations, it’s also more a story told in vignettes. It doesn’t necessarily wrap up one person’s story and then move on to the next. Instead each member of the family has a one chapter focused on them and within that chapter, the reader might get foreshadowing about another character’s […]

US history in one family of women

The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams

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I wanted to like this novel more than I did. I had the opportunity to attend an author talk before I read this and I really appreciated getting the author’s perspective on the story she told, how she structured it and other choices that she made. So that did help me appreciate some parts but in other ways, I wonder if reading it before the event might have been better. This isn’t really the kind of novel you spoil, especially when the blurb shares small […]

When generational trauma meets childhood trauma

Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson

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This was our March book club selection, and I really enjoyed it. I read the author’s debut novel, Black Cake, in February and I feel like she resolved all the issues I had with her writing in that novel here. If anything, I think she could have devoted a bit more time to the past but she genuinely made me care about the present day characters. Good Dirt in this case refers to clay, and a family’s historical legacy that they trace back to an […]

Black AF History: Boring…AF? (Or Maybe Just Hard To Read)

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot

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I will come right out of the gate and say I approached this book the wrong way. I thought it was going to be more of a straight-through read, and it’s definitely something to read in chunks instead. Otherwise everything gets overwhelming and your brain just…shuts down. So perhaps for someone who didn’t try to power through it in a few weeks, or maybe even for someone who listened to the audiobook in its entirety, this book wasn’t…Boring AF. But I definitely found myself wandering […]

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 […]



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