Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Too many unexpected developments = a super vague (but not spoilery) review

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

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This one is so hard to talk about without spoilers! There were at least three big plot points that took me by surprise, so I don’t really want to tell you anything. But I enjoyed 99% of this book, and I’m pretty sure I recommend it, even with that 1%. To start with, Julie is a LADY SPY. She’s beyond great. Unfortunately, she’s been captured by the Nazis, and has been forced to write down secret codes. However, she keeps resisting in whatever small ways […]

An Inside Look at the Nuremberg Trials

Nuremberg Diary by G.M. Gilbert

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This review should more accurately be called an inside look at the defendants of the Nuremburg trials. Nuremburg Diary is a series of in-depth observations and conversations between author G.M. Gilbert and the Nazi defendants, presented in diary form. Before each diary entry, Gilbert sets the trial context. In brief italicized passages, he provides a synopsis of what the trial focused on that day, and follows the passages with detailed accounts of his conversations with the accused. This book was fascinating. The defendants reveal themselves […]

There’s a Good YA Novel in Here Somewhere…

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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This was one of those books that I picked up on a whim in the reading room downstairs while I was waiting on some library loans. “Pulitzer Prize,” I thought. “This will probably not suck.” And it definitely doesn’t suck. But it did take me nearly a month to read, and for a 530-page work of fiction — a pageturner it was not, at least for me. The setup: Two teenagers, Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig, come of age in 1930s France and Germany respectively. […]

A Beautiful and Difficult Novel: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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Pachinko – Min Jin Lee Finished on April 23, took 17 days to read 5 stars on Goodreads Genre: Historical Fiction Rating 2/3 Historical Fiction Pachinko is a beautiful and heart-breaking book. The plot extends over multiple decades of one woman’s life: Sunja. Sunja was born in Japanese-occupied Korea, but eventually marries and moves to Japan prior to the outbreak of World War Two. We follow Sunja and her family (four generations) all the way through the 1980s and their lives in Japan. I was […]

Maybe the movie is better?

The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel

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2.5 stars. I really, really wanted to like this book. Such an interesting story about world war 2 that doesn’t get told in schools. Hitler and other top brass during the war were obsessed with getting their hands on and hoarding artistic masterpieces. (Except, not modern art which they thought was degenerate and they sought to destroy.) Many treasures were stolen away and hidden, creating utter chaos in the art world. Cue the Monuments Men, a special force tasked with locating and saving these pieces […]

Saving their story from obscurity

Code Girls by Liza Mundy

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3.5 stars. I’ve heard so much about Bletchley Park code breakers and the Native American code talkers, that it somehow never even occurred to me that there were tons of Americans actively engaged in breaking both German and Japanese codes during World War II. Like the women at Bletchley Park, the American code women were sworn to secrecy about their work and it’s only now that their work is coming to light. Liza Mundy spent an incredible amount of time and effort tracking down women […]



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