Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Mennonite #MeToo

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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Women Talking is a fictionalized story that is founded on a real story- the ‘ghost rapes’ that occurred in the Manitoba Mennonite colony in rural Bolivia between 2004 and 2009.  For years, women would awake groggy, with signs that they had been sexually assaulted.  Eventually one of the rapists is caught in the act; he confesses his role in the rapes and implicates 8 other men from the colony. Toews, who is from a Mennonite community in Canada, took this horrific story and turned it […]

A Difficult Read With Some Hope

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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I ended up pre-ordering this novel based on llp’s review of this last year.  It was published in Canada long before the Kindle version was available in the United States because I didn’t even remember what this was about by the time it downloaded onto my reader. Toews wrote this novel as a fictional reaction to the horrifying events that happened in a Mennonite community in Bolivia.  I had actually read about the rapes that had plagued the women of the community before llp’s review.  […]

Women talking, getting comfortable with anger

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I picked up Miriam Toews’ newest novel, Women Talking, in the airport recently. I felt very lucky because it ticked so many boxes for me – I had run out of reading material on a work trip so really needed a book, it was in those new resell displays at the news stand so it was discounted enough to get through my NO NEW BOOK PURCHASES embargo, it fits with my vow to read more Canadian literature, and it was published in 2018. Toews has […]



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