Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“To be so ravenous with desperation that the only way out is complete and utter annihilation. A torpedo made of your own sharpened body.”- Senaa Ahmad (or me about wanting to quit this book)

The Age of Calamities: Stories by Senaa Ahmad

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I bought this book for two reasons: the New York Times highly recommended it, and I have always had a fascination with Anne Boleyn and one of the stories was said to feature her. And now you get a story by story commentary on how very much a mistake that decision was. Let’s Play Dead: Right off the bat we have the Anne Boleyn story, and right off the bat I loathe this book. Henry VIII has Anne Boleyn’s head chopped off and the next […]

“For as long as the axe has been in our hands, we have used it to kill.”

Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James

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Much like the wheel, the boat, and the telephone, the axe is a transformative piece of technology—one that has been with us since prehistory. (I did not know we had telephones in prehistory, but hey-you learn something new everyday.) And to this day, even if its everyday use has been supplanted by newer technology, the axe is used as a murder weapon. From the first axe over a half a million years ago, to Lizzie Borden, to So I Married An Axe Murderer, Rachel McCarthy […]

If you like Lovecraftian horror, you might like this better than I did.

Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches, #1) by Cherie Priest

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Before you read too much of my blather, the gist of this review will be that this book was Not For Me. Those two stars mean, “not to my tastes or preferences,” not “this book is very flawed and here’s why.” The review might still be of interest for you for the purposes of finding out if the book might be For You. Maplecroft is an epistolary novel that posits the what if of: What if Lizzie Borden famously murdered her parents for a good […]

Lizzie Borden took an axe?

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4.5 stars. I’d been eyeing this fictionalized account of the Lizzie Borden story for a while so when it was long-listed for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction, I snagged a copy from my library. After reading it, it’s easy to see why it was longlisted. Schmidt is not fucking around with her prose. See What I Have Done is an incredible piece of writing, especially considering that it’s Schmidt’s debut. This is definitely a work of fiction, but there are huge overlaps with actual […]

Creepy as F****

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I finished this book with so many conflicting thoughts/emotions and most of them were unpleasant.  First of all, I appreciate what Sarah Schmidt is trying to do—tell the story of Lizzie Borden and her whacks in such a way that you see (or more accurately feel) that the line between victimizer and victim is blurry and complicated.  Schmidt is a strong writer and by telling the story of the famous murder from the point of view of four characters and in an overlapping but nonlinear […]



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