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:

“Maybe that was their magic. Having fun and enjoying one another’s company. Being lifted up even when you were being beaten down.”

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

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This book was a complete joy to read. I must say that first, because it’s probably the most important part of this review – the book is great, please get a copy and read it, especially if you have or are or were or love a young woman. It’s a five star read for me. It’s 1989, and the Danvers Falcons are tired of being one of the worst field hockey teams in their league. Several of the seniors on this team want this year […]

“… I just want to describe it.”

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

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This book is a match, a brief flame, over before you are fully aware of the heat of the fire. A lingering scent in the air. This slim novel is only 61 pages – a thorough review threatens to be longer than the book itself. An older woman, likely divorced, invests fully in an affair with a married man. His entire self is foreign to her – literally, as in he comes from another country, but also in the sense that he consists of another […]

Another take on memory

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

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I am beginning to sense another trope I seek out in books and enjoy – a woman (person, but I typically enjoy it best if it’s a woman) looks back on some moment of her early life, usually involving a relationship in her late teens or early 20s. Ann Patchet’s Tom Lake fits in that genre. This book, probably the most soothing pandemic book I’ve read yet, was such an interesting book to read shortly after The Rachel Incident, another book in that “woman looks […]

More Irish Drama!

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

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The strengths of this book lie primarily in the reader’s ability to more or less relate to the main character. The narrator, titular Rachel, is in her 30s, married and pregnant. She’s a journalist living in England, originally from Ireland. In passing she learns about the serious illness of a former professor, and this prompts her to reflect on her life in her early 20s. In particular, she focuses on the period of her life as she completed college. In her final semester, she takes […]

The Booker Prize Winner of 2023 – Not exactly a prize winner for me

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

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Do you remember the movie A Time to Kill? This movie is almost 30 years old, which I think pretty much excludes it from the need for spoiler alerts, but in case you haven’t seen it, spoilers ahead: in this movie, Samuel L. Jackson’s daughter is brutally attacked by a crew of racist white men, and because he knows he won’t get any justice for his daughter from the legal system he takes his shotgun and openly murders the culprits (in a truly dramatic way, […]

“To be loved by your father is to be loved by God”

Daughter by Claudia Dey

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I am a big fan of emotional novels, where the plot mostly revolves around characters striving for some sort of relational resolution. But, these novels are pretty tricky to deliver both effectively and entertainingly. I don’t know that Daughter fully succeeds here, but the ideas expressed were interesting enough that I carried through with finishing it. This novel is the story of Mona and her dysfunctional relationship with her father, Paul. Well, truly the entire family is full of dysfunctional relationships. Paul is a writer […]



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