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:

What we talk about when we talk about shame

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies

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Beautiful, funny writing. Incisive, even if this is a familiar plot – picking up after boy meets girl, zooming into the marriage in the time of children. This time, the story begins with a false start and a heart breaking choice, and for these deeply introspective parents that decision recurs with intimidating frequency. Not that they have to decide to have an abortion again and again – but they are forced to consider what it means that they had an abortion again and again, even […]

(Mount) Olympus, Texas

Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann

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I was honestly torn about how I felt about this book for quite a long time. My first impression of the book was that these were pretty terrible people – and, though I do love a good dysfunctional family, and don’t always feel that you have to like the characters in a book in order to enjoy reading about them, this felt a  bit over the top. I struggled a great deal with these characters, until something clicked for me in the end (perhaps being […]

It don’t run in our blood

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida

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This starts out almost like an Elena Ferrante novel – it is the story of female friends, or more accurately frenemies. Both girls are young, but on the cusp of becoming teenagers – and so they think they’re ready to act as adults. The majority of the book takes place in early 1980s San Francisco, in an elite beach community with a view of the bridge and easy access to the ocean. Today, that area might be home to uber rich tech bros, but in […]

“Books contain everything worth knowing, except what ultimately matters.”

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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  This is a book about books, and bodies, and babies. It is a book about the things that haunt us – the things that remain, that refuse to die, so that we have to ask ourselves what purpose they are serving. This is also a book that takes place for the most part over the course of a year that begins in November 2019 – so you know what else this is a book about. The main character of this novel is Tookie, an […]

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?

Landslide by Susan Conley

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About two thirds of the way through reading Landslide I realized I just didn’t like this book very much, I had a choice – keep going, or just put it in the return to library pile. And I decided to keep going, which speaks well for this book! Not every book is just right for every reader – and that often has nothing to do with the quality of the book. That’s definitely the case here. I think this book is really well written, and I […]

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

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I loved each of these finely drawn, often heart breaking vignettes of Black women. When we think of secret lives, we often think of sex – and there’s plenty of that in this book, but as in life, sex means so much more for each of these women. There’s a daughter, stealing moments of pleasure with a married man in a hospice parking lot while their mothers are inside. There’s a daughter, learning how to take crumbs and make them into a whole damn pie. […]

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Filed Under: Fiction, Short Stories Tagged With:

's CBR14 Review No:14 · Genres: Fiction, Short Stories · Tags: ·


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