Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Join Our Spoiler-Welcome Discussion of T. Kingfisher’s Books  

This book also has a character called “the cutie bandit,” which is amazing.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

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When I tell you I was not interested in this book at all and then I zoomed through it in a day and a half. It was a book club pick, and I’d read and liked/loved I think three of her books before this one, but the synopsis just didn’t call to me. But, book club pick, so I reserved it from the library. This book is the epitome of what I mean when I say that writing style is the most important thing in […]

“We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die.”

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

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After years away from Palestine, actress Sonia returns to visit her sister and takes a role in a West Bank performance of Hamlet, where she must grapple with her delicate relationship with her homeland. I’ve never read a book set in Palestine, which is why I requested this book on NetGalley. This book came out in 2023, but the intervening years have only made it more important to read. Hammad does an excellent job of capturing both Sonia’s alienation from and longing for Palestine and […]

Navel Gazers United

Justine by Lawrence Durrell

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Justine follows the various intermingled lives and love affairs of a group of artistic people in Alexandria, where it sometimes seems the city is playing itself out in their daily struggles. This is a bit of a difficult book to write a review of, because frankly not much happens. The narrator is in a relationship with one woman but becomes bound in a passionate affair with another, complicated by the fact that he is friends with her husband, and the fact that this woman Justine […]

Not what I wanted from this concept :(

The Names by Florence Knapp

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To sum up, this was not for me! Move along if that’s enough for you. I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this book and why it didn’t work for me, but after the great first several chapters, I quickly found myself souring on it. The Names is literary fiction with a speculative twist: a woman named Cora has been tasked with registering her newborn son’s name, and the book splits off into parallel narratives with different stories created by her three different choices of […]

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser (translator)

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 The Hour of the Star is a book that climbed onto this year’s TBR by the Read Harder Challenge. One of this year’s tasks is to read a work of literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author. So, I went to books already on my radar to see if any fit the bill and sure enough Clarice Lispector’s final book did just that (Lispector was severely injured in a fire in her 40s and nearly lost her hand). It also was a book […]

Funny and Well-Written, but Left Me Wanting

The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes

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cbr17bingo – red This is an interesting book to review because it accomplished what it set out to do, and accomplished it very well; I’m just not sure I liked what it set out to do. It provides a snapshot of a family over the course of about 10 months. While much of it is from the first person perspective of daughter Miranda, who visits her parents monthly, there are sections that are brief scenes as though from a play, a couple of third person […]



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