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:

“Our lack of power and our oppression are one and the same…”

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

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In a recent Time Magazine interview, Tomi Adeyemi described her first volume of the Legacy of Orïsha series as a kind of answer to the question, “What if Harry Potter had been black?” If people of color were represented more widely in literature and shown to be leaders, heroes, empathetic characters, would the world learn to become more accepting of them in real life? Children of Blood and Bone is full of powerful and heroic characters, many of them female, all of them black or […]

Murder Most Fun

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

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Toward the end of CBR11, someone (Classic, I believe) posted a review of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It had been a while since I had read a good mystery, an even longer while since I had read any Christie, and having just finished The Most Depressing Book Ever, I decided to do myself a treat and see what happened to Roger. I’m not sure why murder mysteries are so gratifying — perhaps the logic of it all, the finding of answers, the […]

Starting the new year with the most depressing book I’ve ever read

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

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Unintentionally, I am starting CBR12 with one of the most depressing books I have ever read. Of Mice and Men is a short novel — a “play/novelette” in the words of its author, John Steinbeck — published in 1937 and turned into a play and film almost immediately. I have to confess that I have no recollection of reading Steinbeck in my school days, but my 10th grader is going to be reading this soon so I thought I would check it out. I recommend […]

The Monsters are the Heroes

Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin

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Back when I was a kid, I loved reading about Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. I read about them in grade school and then, while taking Latin in high school, I read even more. Our copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology got quite a work out. But then, I moved on to other interests and pretty much forgot about mythology until recently, when people like novelist Madeline Miller and translator Emily Wilson have put the gods and goddesses back on my radar. Wake, Siren is […]

The redemptive power of empathy

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

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Lincoln in the Bardo is a fitting novel to read during November, the month of the dead. Set in a Washington, DC, cemetery in February 1862, the novel combines real historical events and an imagined spiritual realm. This is a story about death and loss, moving on (or not), and redemption. As in the film The Sixth Sense, the dead of Oak Hill Cemetery don’t know they’re dead (or if they do, they are not saying so). These souls refer to their coffins as “sick […]



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