Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Point in Time Series Review

Naomi's Gift by Martha Hall Kelly

Ash Wednesday by Paula McLain

Landing by Olivia Hawker

We are Bone and Earth by Esi Edugyan

A Wild Rose by Fiona Davis

Alison's Conviction by Thomas Keneally

Mother Swamp by Jesmyn Ward

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Per usual, here are my reviews for each short story in the collection. Overall, this collection at times moved me and made me do more research on certain events brought up which is why my reading this week was slow (for me). Naomi’s Gift by Martha Hall Kelly (5 stars)-Phenomenal. You can figure out where Kelly is taking you, but I honestly was shocked at the the whole Holocaust camp for women/mothers/children. I keep thinking that there is nothing that could shock me at that […]

Half Blood Blues

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

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Whenever I read James Baldwin, especially his essays, I think about how when he talks about Paris in the 40s and 50s (and so forth) as being a place in which he doesn’t always have to be conscious of his race as a Black man (and especially an African-American). There’s a part of me that gets it, but I also think about what forms of racism, prejudice, or just otherness he still must go through, and understand more so that he’s making a careful calculation […]

The Danger of a Simple Story – Antebellum Version

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

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This book has been on my bookshelf since December 2019 when my mom, sister, and I started doing our own version of Jolabokaflod. I’ve been meaning to read it but it took two short vacations for me to make time to actually dive into the life of George Washington Black, a young slave living on a plantation in Barbados.  Esi Edugyan’s novel is brutal and hauntingly written and totally not what I expected. The novel begins in the 1830’s where a 10-year-old George Washington Black, […]

The Second Life of Samuel Tyne – Esi Edugyan (2004)

The Second Life of Samuel Tyne by Esi Edugyan

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Sometimes a debut novel definitively feels like a debut novel, and this one does. Samuel Tyne is a man approaching middle age when he finds out this his uncle (a more or less wealthy man living in a small town) has died and left him his farm. Samuel unilaterally decides to quit his job (his wife would have wanted to know this) and move his family to that small town. Samuel was born in Gold Coast (Ghana) and is now living in western Canada and […]

“You did not see me — you did not look at me, and see me.”

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

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This novel is a Bildungsroman about a young slave named George Washington Black, or simply Wash. It is Wash’s recollection of the extraordinary events in his life during the 1830s, especially his relationship with Christopher Wilde, aka Titch, the brother of Wash’s master Erasmus Wilde. The story opens with Wash in servitude at Faith plantation on Barbados, but his travels will take him to many lands where the weather is different but people are often the same. Washington Black is the story of a young […]

A Long, Strange Trip

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

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BINGO!!!!! Woo hoo! I am really happy I made my first Bingo with this book, because I loved it. This book is so damn good I”m having trouble figuring out what to say other than, this book is so great! You should read it! George Washington Black is a slave on the Faith Plantation in Barbados. He lives in a shack with Big Kit and works in the sugar fields. When the plantation owner dies, his cousin Erasmus Wilde takes over and an already pretty […]



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