Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What’s in a name?

The Swifts A Dictionary of Scoundrels by Beth Lincoln

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Cbr15bingo Dwelling, illustrations by Claire Powell This is a really fun work of kids lit (ages 8-12) that involves a murder mystery set in a very old ancestral home. Swift manor is a house full of secret passages and rooms, a place that has evolved over time along with the highly unusual Swift family. Each member of the family, at birth, is given a name chosen at random from the family Dictionary. Names seem to turn out to be strangely fitting for each member; is […]

“Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously”

Sawkill Girls (2018) by Claire Legrand

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I find it hard to write or think about YA fiction without thinking about Taylor Swift sometimes–in this particular case, ‘Seven’ from Folklore (2020): “Please picture me in the weeds / Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously /Any time I wanted.” Sawkill Girls is a scream of a book beneath its veneer of preppy popularity politics and teenage drama and desire: a scream of fear and despair and fury, a loud barbaric yawp against vanishing and silencing, a howl against monsters and the different […]

“Oh wretched little one—just like evildoers, the wretched don’t die easy.”

Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

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From the very first page: “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had been thrown into their midst. It all started with a noise coming from an old gravesite with an unmarked tombstone covered in knee-high grass, but […]

It’s Always Those People

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

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“The Netanyahus,” is a fictionalized version of a real-life visit to an American campus by the father of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The subtitle: “An account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family” is a succinct but entirely inadequate description.   The book is also about being part of the Jewish diaspora in America in the 50s and being Jewish anywhere throughout history. It’s also about Israel. The book is so readable primarily because it […]

And it stuns me silent, for a moment: just how vast the gap is between who I am and how people see me.

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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CBR15 BINGO: (Hold Steady Square: The main character here desperately tries to hold steady. She is terrible at it.) This is a little like Daisy Jones and the Six but with tennis, and I’m not mad about it. Not trying to diminish Jenkins Reid’s writing here at all. She has a lane and she is staying in it: complex female characters who are unapologetically who they are. Can they learn from their mistakes? Sure. Can they open up a little and let people in? They can. What they […]

“Honor without intelligence is a disaster. Honor could lose the war.”

The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War by Michael Shaara

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Cbr13bingo violence I read The Killer Angels about 20 years ago, and my lasting recollection was that I was surprised at how it drew me in and how much I liked it. Surprised because this novel, a work of historical fiction, is focused on the most momentous battle of the Civil War – Gettysburg. As much as I enjoy history and historical fiction, military history has never been terribly interesting to me. Michael Shaara accomplished something amazing with this novel: he made me interested in […]



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