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:

Part Fantasy, Part Messianic Fever Dream

Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella

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Cbr13bingo Sportsball Here’s one of those rare (for me) cases of the movie being better than the book. Shoeless Joe, the basis for the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, is a decent-ish fantasy swathed in backward looking heteronormative tropes where a beleaguered white messiah-figure brings redemption to all around him. The parts of the story that interested me involved the baseball field and the players from the past who were resurrected when main character Ray Kinsella built it in his cornfield. Unfortunately, those […]

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Cbr13bingo Cityscape, bingo #4 Row 1 The Pulitzer-Prize winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, set during WWII, is the story of two teenagers who share an unusual connection. Marie-Laure Leblanc is blind and trying to survive the war in St. Malo, France. Werner Pfennig is an orphan with a genius for math and engineering in Zollverein, Germany. While they are on opposite sides of the war, they share a love of science, knowledge, and the world. Yet when we meet them, during the […]

“…wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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Cbr13bingo Travel This short, internationally acclaimed novel reads like a parable. The Alchemist is the story of a young man, simply known as “the boy”, in his quest to find his treasure. Similar to other literary quests or odysseys, the young man will encounter those who help him as well as obstacles along the way, but it is the internal journey he takes, the things he learns, that matter most. The Alchemist is a very spiritual book that emphasizes the connectedness of all things and […]

“There isn’t anything wrong with love. There isn’t anything embarrassing about love.”

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender

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Cbr13bingo They/She/He Just read this novel. It’s incredible. I read it within 24 hours and was crying at the end. This is a YA novel, but I want every adult I know to read this powerful story of a trans teen who struggles to love himself. As a result, all of his relationships are strained. Felix Ever After (2020) is a National Book Award winner, a Stonewall Honor Book and a Time magazine Best YA Book of All Time. It provides a much needed perspective […]

“Stretched on the loom was the huge white cloth of the North. We were the threads.”

Mrs. Mike: A Novel by Benedict and Nancy Freedman

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Cbr13bingo The Wilds, Bingo #3 (four corners and center) Mrs. Mike is a novel based on the true story of Katherine Mary Flannigan, a Boston girl who moved to Canada’s Northwest Territory for health reasons in 1907 and then made a life there. The novel was first published in 1947 and still appears on high school reading lists. I remember the copy we had on our bookshelves when I was a kid, and I remember reading and loving this story when I was about 12 […]

Facts, fiction, and women’s work

The Daring Ladies of Lowell: A Novel by Kate Alcott

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Cbr13bingo Machinery The Daring Ladies of Lowell is  a work of historical fiction set in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1832-33. In addition to including much historical fact about women’s working conditions and life at the mill, it also involves a love story and a murder mystery taken from real life.  Kate Alcott (pen name for Patricia O’Brien) takes her readers into the world of her fictional heroine Alice Barrow as she begins work at the mill, gets to know her fellow workers in […]



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