Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Kicking off 2020 with Girl Power!

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy

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I thought I knew a little bit about code breaking and World War II because I was aware of Bletchley Park, Alan Turing, and Enigma. And I was correct, I did know a little about it. Surprisingly (and maybe sadly?), I was unfamiliar with the story of 10,000 American women who served as codebreakers for both the U.S. Army and Navy during World War II. Code Girls tells the remarkable story of the work, lives, and patriotism of these women. I have to confess that […]

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

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This is it. The last review of my cannonball! And what a book I have chosen to go out on. A friend of mine, seeing on Goodreads that I was edging toward my reading goal for the year, reached out to me with some graphic novel suggestions that I could tackle quickly to get across the finish line. It was great to have her support, and her endorsement that graphic novels “do count” which, of course they do! One of her suggestions was the graphic […]

You can hate the heroine; don’t hate the novel

Atonement by Ian McEwan

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CBR11bingo: History/Schmistory (historical fiction) BINGO: Two Heads Are Better Than One, Back to School, Own Voices, Classics, History/Schmistory While having lunch with a friend recently, we started talking about books and he mentioned that he doesn’t have any use for novels that are “about writing.” On reflection, I realized I am often quite taken with novels that could be classified as metafiction (The Magpie Murders, The Word is Murder/The Sentence is Death, and, going all the way back to CBR V, The Tragedy of Arthur). So […]

New character, old story

White Bird by R. J. Palacio

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There are two ways to look at this book: the cynical way and the not so cynical. First, cynical. You could just say this is a retelling of the Anne Frank story. However, (SPOILER) with two main plot differences: Sara (the Anne character) is hiding alone and not with her family/other families and she survives the ordeal. Finally, the not so cynical way allows you to see that White Bird by R. J. Palacio was inspired by all the stories of World War II and […]

“I have no interest in your orders, I have no interest in what was legal at the time”

The Huntress by Kate Quinn

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Bingo Square: History Schmistory Kate Quinn’s follow up to The Alice Network once again follows multiple timelines and perspectives, though the timelines are much closer together this time around and involve three people.  After a short prologue which includes the only part from the perspective of the titular huntress and a newspaper article introducing the war crimes the huntress committed during World War II, the novel alternates between the character views of Jordan, a teenage girl living in 1946 Boston.  Her widowed father, an antiquarian, […]



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