Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I expected too much

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

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CBR15 BINGO: On the Road, because the fig tree at the center of this story travels from Cyprus to London; also, main character Ada is on the path to understanding her family’s history, and Ada’s parents are immigrants from Cyprus BINGO: Hold Steady, On the Road, North America, Guide, Nostalgia I need to stop reading Goodreads reviews that gush over a novel, because they only set me up for disappointment. I wanted to like this novel so much more than I did, because there are […]

Between the Hate and the Love

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One of my good friends from graduate school, Alev, is from Turkey, and I remember asking her about Turkish authors I should read, and she immediately mentioned Elif Shafak.  I’ve had several of her books on my to-read pile over the last few years, but this was the first one I actually read and I’m sorry that I waited so long. Honour is a complex multigenerational novel that begins in London in the 1990’s as Esma Toprak mentally prepares herself for the release of her brother, […]

Even Old New York was once New Amsterdam

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This novel is about multiple families intersecting around culture, marriage, death, life, abortion, Asia Minor, Djinn’s, and not so oblique literary references. This starts with an aborted abortion. Taking place in multiple settings, namely California and Istanbul, this novel deals with a family of Turks and a family of Armenians being unwittingly and unwantingly shoved together. There’s some second marriages, sex, life, coffee, talks about the world. And so forth. Overall the writing itself I liked just fine and found a lot of the novel […]



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