Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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I am an outlier on this work. Yaa Gyasi writes like a motherfucker and I will continue to seek out her work, but this book just wasn’t for me. Transcendent Kingdom aims for big, heavy topics but its treatment of them never feels more than surface level. This work stands in stark contrast to Homegoing, and while I can see the impulse to go for a different tack there’s such a bare bones approach to the very heavy topics that Transcendent Kingdom attempts to wrangle […]

white whales go down

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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CW: there are a lot here, it is a book about both the Black experience in the US from the days of human slavery to modern times and colonial Ghana so like, you may fill in the blanks I really don’t know why this book took me so long to pick up! (This is a sentiment that will be repeated a few times in the next few reviews, be prepared) There was a time (perhaps it is still ongoing) where the Hot Genre was inter […]

“And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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In one word: Grieving Cannonball Read Bingo: Uncannon I picked this for uncannon because Gyasi is giving new life to a story that we’ve seen many times over from the Eurocentric white perspective. There have been plenty of books about drug addiction (even specifically about Oxycontin and the havoc it is wreaking in America), mental illness, the crossroads of science and religion in academia, and an overachieving character trying to fix her heart by using her head. She is taking very familiar tropes and given […]

A sweeping epic of two families that I could not put down

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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BINGO – Home Summary: Homegoing follows multiple generations of families that start in 17th century Ghana and track all the way through modern day. Homegoing follows a linear plot structure but each chapter switches from family to family and from one generation to the next. This novel is sweeping in its scope. The culmination of the two stories lines comes together in an expected way but one that is still works. Most vignettes of the families are about finding one’s home or space, trying to […]

“This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves.”

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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I am finally getting around to read my second Cannonball Read book exchange gift book this year from Bonnie (thanks Bonnie!) I don’t know what took me so dang long because I loved the first book she gave me, Red White and Royal Blue, and it wasn’t even on my radar to read, and neither was Homegoing and I should have known that Bonnie knows her book business and BOY. DOES. SHE. Homegoing is definitely in my top books of the year, and one I’m […]



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