Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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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