Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the Yay for YA Discussion About YA Books Now  

Lee Smith and friend

Oral History by Lee Smith

The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed by Lee Smith

Sweet Hollow by Lou Crabtree

Fancy Strut by Lee Smith

by Leave a Comment

Cbr13Bingo – Gateway Oral History – 5/5 Stars I don’t know what they did to this book, but the most recent covers are terrible. I love Lee Smith, and I like a lot of fiction that looks like the recent covers of these books, and they are NOT the same. This book is devilish. You should know that going in. Our protagonist is a contemporary woman living in a small town in the far southwestern mountains of Virginia. This panhandle part of Virginia is so […]

Dimestore – Lee Smith (2016)

Dimestore by Lee Smith

by Leave a Comment

CBR13Bingo – Home A short memoir that’s not exactly a memoir. Instead, this short book by Lee Smith is a series of topical essays about her memoir. They tie together in the sense of their being all part of her life, but the individual parts are much more interesting than the whole. They don’t hang together, but treated separately they’re wonderful. If you don’t know Lee Smith, you should! She’s from a small town in the far western mountains of Virginia. From where I lived, […]

So Much to Recommend It, But It Didn’t Live Up: Guests on Earth

by Leave a Comment

  Lee Smith’s Guests on Earth had so much to recommend it. I love books about my home state, North Carolina; it promised Zelda Fitzgerald as a main character, and was centered at the Highland Hospital, a mental institution which burned to the ground in 1948, claiming the lives of nine women; one of them the world-famous Zelda herself. That sounded interesting to me, so I dove in with high hopes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as great as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t as awful as it could […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo