Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Well-Intentioned White Feminist’s Version of Community Is Kinda… [insert eyeroll emoji here]

Community Board by Tara Conklin

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A few years ago I made a deal with myself that I would never apply a star rating to a book that I would have scored < 3 (ETA this note that I mean “less than 3 stars” rather than [heart emoji]). I also went through my entire Goodreads (then pretty prolific) and deleted every single written review, leaving only the star ratings. Short of a book that I found particularly offensive that I thought should require content warnings, I had no written reviews and […]

“Is it too much to wish for such a life? Is it too little?”

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“Just to sit for a moment, herself, no one claiming her time or her thoughts or the product of her mind and hands. What other word to call that if not freedom?” Josephine Bell lives on the Bell Creek Plantation in 1852; she cares for her ailing Missus, Lu Anne Bell, in relative comfort (for a slave) but her cruel Master drives her need to escape before the Missus dies. In New York City in 2004 Lina Sparrow has been assigned to a slavery reparations case […]

“Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run.”

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Ooh, this was a good read. If you liked the parallels in The Girl You Left Behind, you might like this one, even though the setting is very different. “If there is one lesson I wish to bestow upon you, one shred of wisdom I have gained from my living, dying days, it is this: let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers.” In Virginia, in 1852, seventeen […]

Jen K’s Review #11: The House Girl

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This is another novel set up with the two timeline style that seems to be popular, especially for historical fiction. In this case, the past is 1852, and focuses on Josephine, a seventeen year old house slave at the Bell estate, who decides to run. The modern day piece follows Carolina “Lina” Sparrow, first year associate at a corporate law firm in New York. Her mother is dead, and her father is an artist that has finally found success. After 20 years of not talking about […]



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