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:

Two thinly connected perspectives become devastatingly intertwined

A Spell of Good Things by Ayobami Adebayo

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    If you’ve read Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay With Me, you will probably not be surprised that her most recent novel was longlisted for the Booker prize. While both novels are wonderful, I think the scale of storytelling in A Spell of Good Things grows in such powerful ways. As with her previous novels, this story offers a glimpse into modern life in Nigeria, this time taking us into the lives of Wuraola, the daughter of a doctor who is also a doctor herself and […]

Two novels with VERY different takes on grief

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

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“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious.” – Leisel Mueller I found both Chetna Maroo’s debut novel, Western Lane, and Tan Twan Eng’s novel The Gift of Rain via the Longlist for the Booker Prize. While Eng’s was nominated in 2007 (when it was his debut), Maroo’s novel is from 2023 – and the differences between the two do not end at their year of publication. Maroo’s slim novel is spare where Eng’s novel is more epic in nature. In […]

“There must be no greater feeling in the world than to know that this isn’t forever.”

In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

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TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea was the sort of whimsical, heartfelt novel that felt like an instant classic. It is perhaps no small coincidence that it’s publication coincided with the early day of Lockdown in March of 2020. What I (we?) were looking for at that time were books that provided a soft landing. The House in the Cerulean Sea offered what so little in the world could offer at that time – a sense of home and comfort. The characters were […]

“He was the orphan of his former happiness.”

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

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This novel is longlisted for the Booker prize, which is why I requested it from the library some time ago. I knew it was about a retired Irish police officer who receives a call from former colleagues regarding a previous case, which in turn dredges up a variety of emotional scars. That sounded open ended enough, perhaps like a Tana French novel, and I often enjoy thriller-adjacent novels set in Ireland – and from the cover and other vague descriptions, it sounded just dreamy enough. […]

“My quicksilver thread back to all the older versions of me.”

Banyan Moon by Thao Thai

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Look at that gorgeous cover – ignore the Read with Jenna emblem (although, TBH, Jenna has decent taste in books). Those colors, that tree full of wild branches – these evoke the almost restless experience of the three generations of Tran women that populate this novel. The house depicted on the cover looks tiny, but the novel makes clear that the home these women inhabit in Florida was anything but small. Theirs is a verifiable mansion – albeit one in shabby conditions, full of too […]

Friendship and love in the midst of “a shitstorm of murder, mayhem and blackmail.”

The Bandit Queens by Parini Schroff

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I thoroughly enjoyed Schroff’s debut novel. I can’t share specifics about the moment I knew that I had fallen in book-love without spoiling, but essentially the tone fell into place for me about a third of the way into the novel and it never disappointed me thereafter.  Not that I should be too worried about “spoiling” this book – it isn’t a novel based on solving a mystery of any sort. Certain plot points unfold in ways both predictable and delightful (if a little gruesome […]



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