Cannonball Read 13

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“She wondered, for the thousandth time, who got to decide one tradition was right and another was wrong.”

The Butchers' Blessing by Ruth Gilligan

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What makes a tradition a tradition? How and when do we pass from routine to ritual, and ritual to sacred rite? How do we decide what it kept, what is left behind, and what must be destroyed for the good of the future? Ruth Gilligan knows, but she will not give us any easy answers. Instead, she gives us snapshots; a literal photograph  sets us in motion, but glimpses into the life of “modern Ireland” connect the pieces by stringing one red knot to another. […]

Lost and Found

The Searcher by Tana French

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A hallmark of Tana French’s incredible body of work is how she will always use spaces in a critical and often harrowing way to her narrative. Wooded forests, the basement of an abandoned building, a rustic home for young academics…there’s always something mystifying and foreboding about how she can take the banal and make it come alive in ways one wouldn’t expect. Here is no exception. Playing with the familiar English/British countryside mystery, French uses rural Ireland set against the mountains. And as might be […]

Tana French is back with a vengeance and a penchant for Wild West-isms, and I am HERE. FOR. IT. 

The Searcher by Tana French

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This is a safe review; I’ll give you no spoilers and I’ll give you no major plot points- but I will let you know that no, we have not returned to the Dublin Murder Squad. While I found the departure disappointing in The Witch Elm, I found it thrilling here; the idyllic landscape filled with the insidious creep of small town communities. While we have not returned to the Murder Squad, we have returned to having a protagonist on the searching side of the law- and […]

Are you Longing for some Longing?

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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This was one of Faintingviolet’s top reads of 2019, and I also desperately wanted to watch the Hulu show, especially after Dustin’s review.  They were both right- this book was great. If you haven’t seen the Hulu trailer, this is a teenage/college age lovestory, set first in Sligo, northwest Ireland, and later in Dublin.  The two main characters are flawed but compelling- Marianne is smart, witty, not particularly pretty and uninterested in what other people think about her.  She also has the fortune/misfortune of being […]

The Troubles

Say Nothing: A True Story of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Read as part of cbr12 bingo: Pandemic! I’ve wanted to read this one for a bit and it doesn’t really fit in any other category. Few books have had the kind of hype that Say Nothing has been getting the last 12-18 months. It wound up on dozens of “Best Of” lists in 2019. It was recommended by Barack Obama. Friends who read it gushed about it. Given that’s a history tale (yes) about a subject I know little about but am curious of (uh-huh), I knew […]



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