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:

Layered lives

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

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I first heard of this book while reading Slate online. The article was framed as a newly discovered interview with C.M. Lucca from 2005, and so I clicked because I do love reading author interviews  – not to mention, I wondered by such an interview from 2005 would be relevant today. Do I need to say that I was taken by the premise of the article – that the subject herself existed, that she was indeed an accidental biographer of her late wife, known as […]

A thriller about grief that only made me cry a little bit

The Guide by Peter Heller

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Peter Heller writes such introspective thrillers. I am not a fisher, and I know very little about the technical terminology related to outdoors activities like hunting, or fishing, or riding horses. At times, it was almost like reading words from another language, and I used context clues to determine that word must refer to a shoe, or that must be another word for a fishing rod. Despite the language barrier, I found myself captivated by this meditation on grief, guilt, mixed with an anti-capitalist thriller […]

“I could tell you the facts, or I could tell you how it felt.”

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

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I’ve missed so many reviews. But so many that I would have written feel like they were about books read in a different year all together, not just in the last two months. That’s because they were really read in a different part of my life. My father died on June 13, 2023. Thursday would have been his 65th birthday. We knew it would happen, sooner than we wanted, but it still felt too soon. Too fast. I don’t have good words to talk about […]

Wild, Inventive, Fascinating Mystery

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

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Are you in a book rut? Would you like a jolt to your reading life? Please pick up this novel and dive into not only the puzzle, but (if you’re anything like me) various internet rabbit holes about the history of Vietnam that it’s possible (likely?) you have never been taught. This story moves through time, with a larger cast of characters, but the framing mystery is the disappearance of Winnie. Winnie is half Vietnamese and an American, but traveled to Saigon to teach English. […]

A moving story, even if it was a little flat for me

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

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I feel as though I SHOULD have liked this novel much more than I actually did. It is related to the shameful history of forced sterilization that took place in the US, mostly impacting poor, non-white women, that was exposed shortly after the revelations of the Tuskegee experiment came to light. If you don’t know much about the Tuskegee experiment, I highly recommend the Nova documentary on it, which is a little dated but still relevant. The section that explains how many researchers, especially black […]

“It’s the echo she wants more than the sound.”

Tides by Sara Freeman

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This debut from Canadian Sara Freeman has been compared to writers like Jenny Offill, and I understand that comparison. This book is the type of novel you can devour in one or two sittings. There are no chapters, simply brief paragraph after paragraph, often only one, perhaps two, on a page. Despite the brevity, the prose is dense. While it can, and inevitably will be read quickly, the material itself is far more sticky. Some elements of her writing had far more in common with […]



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