Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About ElCicco

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Married, mom of two, history PhD, feminist. I've been participating in Cannonball Read since CBR4. I love to read, and writing reviews keeps me from reading without thinking. I feel like I owe it to the authors who entertain me to savor their creations. It's like slowing down and enjoying a delicious meal instead of bolting your food. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: ElCicco's Quick Questions interview.)

ElCicco's Reviews:

The realness of the story is what makes it so terrifying

Tell Me What I Am: A Novel by Una Mannion

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Cbr16bingo Golden, +2 bingos This novel won the Crime Writer Association’s 2024 Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year. It is a riveting, disturbing and heartbreaking story that I didn’t want to put down. At the center of it is the disappearance of Deena Garvey and its impact on her daughter Ruby and sister Nessa. Una Mannion takes us back to the events leading up to Deena’s disappearance and then forward some 15 years later where the reverberations of this traumatic event […]

“…all you can truly say of any historical event … is that ‘something happened.’”

The Sense of an Ending: A Novel by Julian Barnes

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Cbr16bingo Free Spot (sub for Rings square), +3 bingos The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel that won the Booker Prize. It is short but manages to delve into deep themes regarding memory, history and remorse through a story with a surprising finish. Told in two parts by the same narrator, Tony Webster, the reader must constantly question Tony’s memory and reliability, as he himself does. Part 1 of the novel finds Tony as a teenager in the 1960s with his friends in […]

The TV Series is Better

The Umbrella Academy Vol.1: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy Vol.2: Dallas by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy Vol.3: Hotel Oblivion by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

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Cbr16bingo Earth Day, bingo I really enjoyed The Umbrella Academy series on Netflix and just did a binge of the first three seasons before watching the fourth and final season. Overall, I thought it was excellent. The resolution to the series was great and made sense of a lot of stuff that had been unresolved. I knew it was based on a graphic novel series and decided to pick it up and see how the the TV series compares to the original, and surprisingly for […]

FOMO/YOLO, MOFO!

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

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Cbr16bingo Tech I only picked this up in order to fill the Tech square on my bingo card. It’s not the kind of book I would have looked at otherwise — nonfiction with an emphasis on military flights and the space program? Ugh, no thanks. But in Tom Wolfe’s hands, the topic does become more interesting and readable. The book started as an article for Rolling Stone Magazine about that certain quality that the men involved in the early days of the space program seemed to […]

“I know now that what’s tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.”

Another Brooklyn: A Novel by Jacqueline Woodson

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Cbr16bingo Disco, bingo  (1970s New York, marginalized communities) In the author’s notes at the end of this novel, Woodson writes that her inspiration came from her thoughts on “what it means to grow up a girl in this country,” particularly in 1970s Brooklyn. Those familiar with Woodson’s novels — read Brown Girl Dreaming and Red at the Bone, both excellent — know that she has an incredible talent for writing about the experiences of Black girls in specific points in US history such as the […]

Saucy!

The Duke Who Didn’t: Wedgeford Trials Book 1 by Courtney Milan

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cbr16bingo And Also —for the Part 1 square  For CBR15 I read Courtney Milan’s The Brothers Sinister series (based on recommendations from fellow Cannonballers) and loved it. When I initially asked for advice on where to start with Milan’s work, The Duke Who Didn’t came up frequently. While The Brothers’ Sinister series deals a lot with women’s rights and the suffrage movement, this start to the Wedgeford Trials series has a focus on minorities in England, discrimination, and appropriation. Milan, as ever, is careful and […]



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