Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Whitehead goes for a totally different vibe here–and it works very well

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

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Free: got this new book from my library, which purchased it on my recommendation (and, as always, gets a chunk of change from me at year end as a blanket thank you! libraries are great!) This book started off somewhat slowly for me, which I found surprising since clarity of vision and scene has always stood out to me as one of Whitehead’s strengths. In both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, the setting is almost as important (more important?) than the characters who move about it. […]

It’s a literal railroad

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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“Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” I was hesitant to start this book since I had so much trouble with finishing (really, starting) Zone One (from the same author) but I was pleasantly surprised that this immediately got my attention and I found myself compulsively reading it.  The story us about Cora, a slave in a plantation in Georgia.  Her mother had escaped when she was young and she is an outcast even from her fellow slaves.  […]

I can’t fully get on board the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad won both the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, and part of me is sheepish that I can’t get behind that level of admiration. While the novel is powerful and at times poignant, I had a fundamental issue with its execution. The novel focuses on Cora, a young slave on a Georgia cotton plantation whose mother was infamous for having been the only slave to ever escape that estate. Cora is an outcast even […]

“Like justice, it existed in theory.”

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

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The Nickel Boys has been well loved by cannonballers and for good reason. It is an unflinching, unsentimental fictionalized account of the Arthur G. Dozier School, a very real “school” where “delinquent” children as young as five would be, in effect, enslaved by the men who ran the school. Some of the survivors are currently pursuing a class action lawsuit against the State of Florida. Plot: Elwood is a gentle, intelligent Black boy aspiring to attend college and become a meaningful member of the civil […]

“Elwood received the best gift of his life on Christmas Day 1962, even if the ideas it put in his head were his undoing.”

The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

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Cbr12bingo Cannonballer Says, BINGO x2: vertical Red to Money, horizontal Cannonballer Says to Adaptation For the second year in a row, my Cannonballer Says square is filled with a book reviewed by TeresaElectro! Last year it was Rebecca Roanhorse’s excellent Trail of Lightning. This year it’s Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Nickel Boys. Four years ago I reviewed Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which was an amazing tour de force dealing with American history and American racism. The Nickel Boys is another clear-eyed, no-punches-held look […]

Small but mighty, a lot of heartache in a little book (Bingo – Friendship)

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

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This novel is based on the true story of a boy’s reform school in Florida where abuse and mistreatment were rampant. And if that’s not enough, it’s also about the implications of race in such an environment, and how one black young man (Elmwood) essentially is railroaded into this awful place by being in the wrong place at the right time. The 2020 Pulitzer winner is not messing around. At it’s core, it is the story of the friendship that blossoms between Elmwood and Turner, […]



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