Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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cbr12bingo – Fresh Start

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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I have a confession to make: I judged this book by its cover. I remember the frenzy of press around this book, the series, and the *mysterious* author. I also remember seeing the cover and being completely uninterested. It is, in my opinion, a dreadful cover. It looks like it was cobbled together to act as a prop. It looks like a poorly thought out passion project. I still think the cover is awful, but I am glad that I changed my mind around shunning […]

“He breathed in my face the coffee he’d just drunk, mingled with the odor of his gums.”

A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

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1970s Naples: a thirteen year old girl of privilege is suddenly removed from her seaside home and returned to a cramped and dirty apartment outside the city.  The key word here is “returned”; our heroine has been sent “home” to a place that she never knew. She spent her entire life living with her glamorous mother and policeman father, only to have that reality shattered in one afternoon when the man she knew as her father bundles her and all of her belongings into the […]

How the Other Half Lives

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I revisited this book for class, and while the language and visceral imagery remained the same this time as it did on my first read, I was struck this time by just how much the theme of education ran through this story. For a general recapping of the story, here’s the amazon blurb: “Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the […]

The Review of the Great Books

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I really, really liked Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is an incredibly blase way to compliment a book so raw and confrontational and, well, brilliant. The remaining three books in the Neapolitan Novels series build on the strong momentum established by the first and, in the process, continue to be some of the most poignant reading I’ve experienced in ages. The feelings that these books provoked in me were strong and visceral, inflamed and tender in their ebb and flow. These are not feel-good […]

Fact or Fiction?

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  I do like that my MFA forces me to read books I wouldn’t normally pick up. While it’s not always a sure-fire way to a favorite read, “My Brilliant Friend” makes my top 10 for ‘required reading.’ A note of caution, this is a long book and is followed up by four subsequent sequels that will totally suck you in, so unless you’re willing to devote a copious slot of time to this story, beware! I was only mildly enjoying the read and thought […]



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