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:

A slow burn with fire breathing dragons

Assistant to the Villain: A Novel by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

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Like This Will Be Fun, Assistant to the Villain is a romance/fantasy with a good amount of humor  and thrilling adventure thrown in. Assistant is the first book in a series, and I found this one entertaining enough that I will definitely be reading the next installment Apprentice to the Villain (the third book, Accomplice to the Villain, just came out this year). I’ve sort of accidentally found myself reading romantasy lately, and frankly, it’s kind of a nice break from reality. I liked Assistant […]

Bingo Blackout + Cannonball!

This Will Be Fun: A Novel by E.B. Asher

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Cbr17bingo review — by Finnyfinfinn E.B. Asher is the pen name for the three authors who wrote This Will Be Fun together: Bridget Morrissey, Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka. They are all romance authors, and while there are a couple of lovely romances in this story, it is also an adventure full of bickering and swashbuckling. It’s funny and highly entertaining while dealing with some more serious issues like grief, betrayal and survivor’s guilt. Thanks to Finnyfinfinn for the previous review. In the mythical Queendom […]

‘Tis the Season

Batman The Long Halloween: the Prequel Haunted Knight by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

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I happened to see this at our local library as part of a Halloween Readings display. A long long time ago, I read a whole lotta Batman, including Loeb’s Hush, which I recall thinking was very good. Hush was drawn by the brilliant Jim Lee, which made the reading all the more interesting. There was a time when I read DC graphic novels regularly, but I got kind of tired of it and found other reading more to my liking. While this “prequel” to The […]

Believe the hype

James: A Novel by Percival Everett

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Cbr17bingo TBR (2 bingos) James won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. For some people, “literary fiction,” especially the prize-winning kind, can be intimidating and/or off-putting, but this novel is engaging, exciting and horrifying from page one. James is Percival Everett’s imaging of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his adventure down the Mississippi River, gets separated from him, and is reunited with him again near the end. Everett imagines […]

Sometimes a “Hallmark Movie” type of book is just what you need

The Collected Regrets of Clover: A Novel by Mikki Brammer

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Cbr17bingo Rec’d (2 bingos) This book was a staff pick/rec at my local bookstore The Collected Regrets of Clover is a novel about death and grief and about friendship and love. Main character Clover is a 30-something living in New York. She has had a unique connection to death since she was a child, but as an adult she is now struggling with loneliness and grief. A new job and a series of events could potentially take Clover in a direction she has long desired, […]

“That’s just what translation is…. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases…”

Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (A Novel) by R.F. Kuang

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Cbr17bingo Black Imagine a world in which a kind of magic exists that is only accessible to those skilled in foreign language, those who are so fluent they dream in those languages. In Babel, RF Kuang immerses the reader in a world that, despite the presence of “magic,” is strangely and sadly familiar. This is a novel about imperialism and racism, but it’s also about friendship and bravery in the face of odds stacked against you. It is a long novel (over 500 pages) but […]



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