Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Ghost Story

The Voyage Home: A Novel (Women of Troy Book 3) by Pat Barker

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The Voyage Home is Pat Barker’s final installment in her Women of Troy trilogy. The first two novels, The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, take on the events of The Iliad and imagine them from the point of view of the vanquished, in particular from the point of view of the Trojan women who became enslaved to the victorious Greek armies. The princess Briseis, who became Achilles’ concubine/slave, was the primary focus of those novels, which were brutally realistic in their […]

A tale as old as time

The Women of Troy: A Novel by Pat Barker

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The Women of Troy is the follow up to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, her imagining of the Trojan War/Iliad from the point of view of the women and girls who saw their city fall and became enslaved to their enemies. The focal point remains Briseis, pregnant with Achilles’ child, with a few chapters from the view of Achilles’ teenaged son Pyrrhus. This novel finds its characters stuck in a sort of limbo; the war is over, the Greeks victorious but unable to […]

What’s Hecuba to him? or to her?

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker

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I devoured Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls just after Christmas, and was pleased to find that the sequel, The Women of Troy, was also available. And so what better way to start my Cannonball read this year (my first ever), than by a review of this fantastic book? You don’t need to have read Silence of the Girls (though you should, because it’s excellent) because Barker reiterates the important stuff which went down in that book which has its impact on this one, […]

More odds and ends

The Hummingbird's Gift by Sy Montgomery

Stitches by Anne Lamott

Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross

Insurrecto by Gina Apostelo

The Grass Dancer by Susan Power

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth

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The Hummingbird’s Gift – 4/5 Stars Mostly a published long essay, but still a compelling story about hummingbirds in general, but specifically those hummingbirds that become abandoned, injured, lost, or otherwise in need of human care to be rehabilitated and brought up to health enough to be part of natural life again. In this book, we find out that hummingbirds exist upon a series of contrasts. They are quite small, but fierce fighters. In the descriptions of the fighting from this book, two birds locked […]

“I think I saw our ghosts”: a devastating modern WWI novel

Regeneration by Pat Barker

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Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was one of my favorite novels of 2018; I read it after teaching The Iliad for the first time, fascinated by the idea of a novel that told the events of the epic primarily from a feminine point of view: namely, that of Briseis, the Trojan captive that Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over. It was also my first introduction to Pat Barker in general, and was I ever appreciative of that when I learned that Barker had also written a […]

“We need new songs.”

The Silence of the Girls: A Novel by Pat Barker

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I recently reviewed Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles for CBR12 bingo, and I referred to it as a gateway into a genre I call “reimagined classics” or “classics fanfic”. The Silence of the Girls is yet another outstanding addition to this genre and it happens to overlap with The Song of Achilles, presenting several main characters and incidents from The Iliad from a very different perspective. Pat Barker imagines for us the life of Briseis, a Trojan princess who becomes Achilles’ slave. Through the […]



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