Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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This one did not meet my expectations

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

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This novel should have been an easy like for me. Set in New York during the pre-war and WWII period, Manhattan Beach explores women’s factory work, the dangerous world of diving, and the merchant marine. It also involves a mystery — that of the missing father. The problems for me involve both character and plot development. At the end, I was wondering why characters behaved as they did and why the significance of their actions was not better explained.  The central character of Manhattan Beach […]

Finished a Great American Novel on Independence Day

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

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Read as part of CBR 11 Bingo: TBR Pile Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach is such a brilliant, beautiful book that I’m having difficulty conjuring up words to review it. It’s not leaving me breathless the way 2666 did, more so a state of stark admiration where I feel like words won’t do it justice. There are some writers who have a style that just works for the reader and I suppose Egan’s is one for me. Literature and general fiction are not really my bag so if you told […]

“How do you know a gangster?” “Usually, the room goes a little quiet when he walks in.”

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Manhattan Beach feels like Jennifer Egan wrote three (maybe even four) short stories and then decided they could possibly be connected so she loosely strung them together and called them a novel. The A plot is Anna, a young woman who works in the Navy yard in New York during WW2 who finds her calling as a diver. She has an overprotective mother, a crippled sister and an absent father. The B plot is about a gangster named Dexter Styles who becomes a bit infatuated with […]

The Sea, The Sea

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As a writing instructor, the problem with starting a book right after Thanksgiving is that there are so many other texts competing for your attention—revised drafts of analytical essays, annotated bibliographies, and thanks to my class for new writing center tutors, lots of wonderful reflections and projects.  As a result, though I was sucked into the story of Jennifer Egan’s new novel right from page one, it took me awhile to get through it.  I actually used it as motivation—read and respond to five essays […]



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