Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The girls were wild for dancing, and nothing else. No hearts beat underneath those thin, bright dresses. They laughed like glass.”

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine

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3.5 stars This is a very imaginative and clever re-telling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy-tale set in Prohibition NYC. The princesses are flappers and their father is some kind of business magnate trying to protect his family legacy without a son, the poor man. He keeps them locked up in their large home to protect their virtue and reputation, because that’s a surefire way to earn the obedience of teenagers. Here’s the overview from Goodreads: “Jo, the firstborn, “The General” to her eleven sisters, is the only thing the Hamilton girls have in place of a mother. She is […]

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6/14/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:44 |

The American Revolution Through Slaves’ Eyes

The Seeds of America Trilogy: Chains, Forge, and Ashes by Laurie Halse Anderson

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Laurie Halse Anderson’s award-winning YA novels set during the American Revolution are superb. Not only does she get her history correct — with fascinating detail about daily life for wealthy and working classes, Loyalists and Patriots, city life and army camp life — but she also provides narrators whose perspectives are unique and provocative. Isabel and Curzon are slaves. Each brings a different view of the revolution and what it means for them as slaves. The three novels take the reader from May of 1776, when the British are about to invade New York, through the harsh winter of 1777-78 at […]

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6/6/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:24 |

From an embattled son to a genocidal conqueror

Birth of an Empire and Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden

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In late February, as I was preparing for a work trip to Mongolia, it occurred to me that I knew nothing about the country. I knew nothing about the history or its culture, nothing about its customs or its icons. The only thing I knew was Genghis Khan, and… yea, just his name. That’s it. Luckily, a Pajiban mentioned the Conqueror Series by Conn Iggulden, recommending it as a historical fiction alternative to trawling Wikipedia (which is honestly what I would have done.) I downloaded the series in bulk, and got through the first two books during my month-long trip […]

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5/25/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:7 |

Origin Story of an Icon

Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era by Eiji Yoshikawa

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While the link is for the entire Musashi saga, this review is of the first paperback volume which seems to be out of print or otherwise unavailable from Amazon directly. There are five or six volumes of the paperback version of the story. One of the first RPG videogames I ever played was Brave Fencer Musashi on the original Playstation. While the game was fun and lighthearted, I learned from a video game store employee that Musashi was actually an iconic Japanese figure. I wanted to learn more, but it wasn’t until decades later that I finally hunkered down and invested the time. Eiji […]

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5/22/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:15 |

Ladies Who Paint

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith

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When I first started reading The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith, I was pretty sure I didn’t like it. The first chapter felt like it was about dissatisfied rich people and I was not in the mood for that nonsense.  Happily, it is not about dissatisfied rich people, nor is it about the theft and forgery of a Dutch painting, which is what I thought it was about after I decided it wasn’t about rich people.  Really though, it’s about three very different lives that were impacted by the painting in very different ways. We first […]

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5/11/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:17 |

You could do worse than this fictionalized primer on the War of the Roses

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

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3.5 stars Philippa Gregory is a giant in her corner of historical fiction, which seems essentially “Aristocrats and Nobles of 15th and 16th century Britain (particularly Women).” Even though I had never read her books, I had a detached respect for her as a well-researched author whose fictionalizations garnered generalized interest for the history her books cover. That impression holds true, and I still appreciate her doing her thing. I get that because she’s working from a record of stuff that actually happened, she can only embellish or editorialize so much before she risks becoming simply inaccurate. However, I still […]

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5/8/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:36 |

In which I take another step toward beatific acceptance of my plebian taste

By Blood by Ellen Ullman

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This probably qualifies as another lit-fic fail for me, by which I don’t mean that the book was a failure; I mostly likely just failed to appreciate it. It’s one of those oniony books that has a lot of layers, and characters who relate to each other on levels both appropriate and otherwise. Set in the 1960’s, there’s a story of a young woman who finds out she is of European Jewish descent, and finds herself digging into her history by way of trying to locate her birth mother. This story is told by the young woman to her therapist, […]

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5/3/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:34 |

Back at sea with my imaginary BFF’s

The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian

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Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series is one of my favourites of all time. Despite initially not having much of a clue what the many, different sailing terms meant, somewhere in the first instalment I fell hook, line and sinker for the characters – particularly for the delightfully grumpy Stephen Maturin – and since then, whenever times have got tough and I need a pick-me-up, I treat myself to a little holiday in their company. As O’Brian is deceased and the series numbers twenty books, I’ve been making sure that I don’t binge on them so that I’ll know that I have […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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4/18/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:25 |

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