Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“My mother had little sense of childhood, and simply saw it as an inconvenient life stage to be got through as quickly as possible.”

Diamonds at the Lost and Found by Sarah Aspinall

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I bought a lot of memoirs on my vacation this summer and realized when I got home how many are about fraught mother-daughter relationships. I guess I’m working through something, or else I just like reading about dramatic psychological family structures. Either way, Diamonds at the Lost and Found fits in the template of the troubled mother and the put-upon daughter who’s dragged in her wake. This book takes a nested narrative format, where Aspinall simultaneously tells the story of her childhood and adolescence being […]

hide all you want, but nothing stays buried

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

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Jeanie and Julius have spent their entire lives together. Over half a century of life together has passed, and they have never spent an entire night separate from each other. Jeanie tends the garden with their mother, Dot, and Julius works odd jobs in the village. Jeanie, Julius, and Dot depend fiercely on one another. They accept nothing from the outside world- at least, Jeanie and Julius spent the last 51 years believing that they were accepting nothing and indebted to no one but each […]

rain, rain, go away

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

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Is there anyone who isn’t at least slightly maddened by days and days on rain? I’ve spent many summers working outdoors under mostly temporary cover. It’s been years, but I vividly remember the feeling of perpetually wet socks and bones that felt internally chilled. In the summer of 2008, when I was working as an adventure guide at a camp in the White Mountains, it rained 29 days in June and 30 days in July. We ran out of “rainy day” activities less than a […]

(not exactly) The Prime of Mr. Jackson Brodie

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

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It’s been nine years since we’ve last seen Jackson Brodie, and in those nine years a lot has changed. So much has changed that I found myself lost a few times- am I supposed to remember this? Is that name supposed to mean something? Is this kid important? Jackson seemed a bit adrift at times as well, but I suppose that was more intentional than my foggy memory. The world has changed for Jackson. His career, his family, his car, his dog- it’s all changing. […]

an exercise in lying to liars

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

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What began as a slow and cold (le Carré-esque) waiting game grew into a white hot flash of deceit, anxiety, and dangerous thrills. I cannot claim to know the full horrors and trials of World War II- nor can I draw a true comparison between that dark time and the present, but the world of this book is a different world from our current version. One constant remains: the truth is subjective. In 1940 a young woman is recruited into the fold of MI5. Europe […]



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