Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Good book. Crap timing

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

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  Reading this book in early/mid-March 2020 was a huge error in judgement on my part.  I guess I thought immersing myself in a plague story would lessen my anxieties about the real world. It…didn’t work.  Having said this, Year of Wonders was truly a captivating read with a dynamic heroine who faces the horrors of the plague on and comes out on the other side deeply changed. Anna Frith is a somewhat timid young widow in a small English village who is making ends […]

Libris Mediocris

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

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*Sigh.* Folks. Before we get into this, the customary preamble. These things may seem unrelated at first, but hopefully they’ll make sense shortly enough. There’s a tossed-off line in Stella Gibbons’ excellent Cold Comfort Farm (the movie is also a scream if you haven’t seen it) where one of the characters, an irritating self-satisfied clod of a fellow, is working on a thesis which holds that all of the Brontes’ novels were actually written by their brother Branwell. The little-known film Titanic came out the winter after […]

What did Marmee’s husband do during the war?

March by Geraldine Brooks

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Cbr11bingo Birthday. Geraldine Brooks was born September 14, 1955. Bingo #9 Geraldine Brooks’ 2006 novel March is a brilliant Civil War novel that imagines the lives of Marmee and Mr. March, the parents of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Brooks, a journalist by trade, has a history of writing thoroughly researched and highly imaginative fiction. I’ve read most of her novels and they have all been superb. Year of Wonders, Caleb’s Crossing and People of the Book are all fantastic. I know I read March […]

The Anti-Gone with the Wind

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This book is sort of like a combination of Cold Mountain and Gilead. And I mean that as a good thing because I really like both of those novels. The premise is that this novel tells the lost story of Mr. March, the father figure of Little Women while he is off to war. It’s told as a personal narrative from Mr. March’s perspective, with a small section near the end in the voice of Ms. March. March doesn’t go to fight in the war but to be […]

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

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I liked this book, but I’m slightly annoyed because I feel like I should have liked it more than I did, and that makes me like it less. That makes no sense, I’m sure, but there it is. People of the Book is a mostly fictional story about the Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. The book existed, and so did some of the events the author includes, but it’s mostly fiction. In the novel, a rare book expert named Hannah […]

Cold in Iceland

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Burial Rites is Hannah Kent’s first novel and an auspicious start to her career. Set in 1828-1830, the plot is based on real people and factual events surrounding the last execution of a criminal in Iceland. For those who prefer their fiction historical and who have enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s Alias, Grace or the novels of Geraldine Brooks (who is thanked in the author’s note), this is a book you will want to read. In 1828, a well known herbalist and healer (some said sorcerer) named […]



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