Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I'm a special education teacher by day and a reader by most other hours. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Booktrovert's Quick Questions interview.)

booktrovert's Reviews:

“Some things, Vera knew, were made to die.”

Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey

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If you enjoy seasonal reading, I’d put this on the list for October – it has nice spooky bones and a strong creepy vibe (as you can pretty plainly tell from the cover art). Whenever you’re ready, the Crowder House will be waiting for you. Vera Crowder’s dad built the home that she grew up in – the home that she would leave at 16, and the home where she would return to witness the death of her mother.  The Crowder’s are a complicated family, […]

Both more finance AND mystery than I expected

Trust by Hernan Diaz

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When Trust was longlisted for the Booker prize, it was described as a “literary puzzle about money, power and intimacy” – and that’s quite apt for this novel. By the time I got around to reading it, I had all but forgotten any previous descriptions I had read about the novel, and thus the amount of talk about the 1929 (among others) market crash was a bit unexpected. Because this is a novel and not a textbook, the finance talk eventually gives way to a highly […]

“… the voices to whom the story belongs.”

Hell's Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, A Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier by Susan Jonusas

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This is a book about a family of murderers, but also about the entire context of life in the in middle 19th century. Maybe it’s because I’ve got dysfunctional politics on the brain right now (gee, I wonder why?) but a chapter I found most interesting felt very out of context in a book about  a serial killing family. Instead, this chapter detailed a political fight in Kansas 150 years ago – and would you believe that it involved allegations of sexual impropriety on the […]

Absorbing historical fiction

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell was inspired by this painting of Lucrezia de’ Medici, Duchess of Ferrara – something about how skeptical, almost frightened she looks in her eyes was captivating to the author. The image becomes even more haunting when taken with the fact that it must have been completed around the time of her marriage to the Duke of Ferrara – with whom she lived for less than a year before her untimely, and some would say suspicious, death at only 16 years old. In The Marriage […]

A triumph of love, loss and redemption

Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin

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This book is remarkable. What a pleasure to read such a book at the end of the year, as we prepare to say goodbye to the old year and start again. A novel that is about death is really about new beginnings. This book is about starting again, and grieving, and forgiveness, and … I’m getting ahead of myself. Violette Trenet, married name Toussaint, is a caretaker in a cemetery in Bourgogne, France. The novel, translated with such eloquence by Hildgard Serle, uses the most […]

“It was really happening. She was in a closet, with her high school boyfriend, listening to a man talk to another man about an ill-gotten duck.”

Flying Solo by Linda Holmes

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  This was a comforting novel wherein a search for the provenance of a wooden duck is essentially a metaphor for a search for the meaning of life – particularly one lived by a single woman over 40. The opening chapter describes how Laurie would escape her home – loving, but full of the noise of her four brothers (two older, two younger) – and remove herself to the comfort of her Great Aunt Dot’s home. Dot would make space for Laurie, allowing her peace […]



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