Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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 […]

Journey to Nowhere

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

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cbr11bingo: Travel Washington Black is a slave born on a Barbados plantation who thinks he and his surrogate mother Big Kit are going to spend their entire lives as slaves before dying and waking up in her native Dahomey. Instead, when his master’s brother arrives for a long visit, Wash’s life is irrevocably changed. That brother, Christopher Wilde, known to the world as Titch, is a scientist and an adventurer who selects Wash personally to be his attendant. That isn’t all Titch has in made. […]



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