Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Jenny S

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By day (and night really), I teach writing and help run a writing center at a community college in the Chicago suburbs. However, my superpowers include creating towering stacks of to-read books next to my bed.

Jenny S's Reviews:

Ain’t No Party Like an Octavia Butler Writer’s Workshop

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera

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Though my life growing up as a heterosexual, cis-gender white woman in the Midwest is worlds away from that of Juliet Milagros Palante, who describes herself as a “closeted Puerto Rican baby-dyke from the Bronx”(5), I think anyone with a heart and a soul can relate to this coming of age story.  Even more importantly, everyone can learn from it. The year is 2003 and 19-year-old Juliet is about to spend a chunk of her first summer home from college far away from her Bronx […]

Can you say Gentrification, Boys and Girls?

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up. But it’s not just the junky stuff they’ll get rid of. People can be thrown away too, like last night’s trash left out on sidewalks or pushed to the edge of wherever all broken things go.  What those rich people don’t always know is that broken and forgotten neighborhoods […]

Everyone Needs Their Own Group of Corgis

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

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This novel is one of the books that I received from Bonnie for the Cannonball Read Book Exchange.  One thing to know is that I had the hard cover copy of the book checked out from my community college library (which has an amazing collection of new fiction with few folks on the waitlist) for an embarrassingly long time—since maybe July (just kept renewing it . . .). Just when I was starting to get threatening e-mails from circulation mentioned the replacement cost of the […]

Thank You, Thank You, and My Local College Library Thanks you

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  I am embarrassed to say that though I am just posting this now, these two lovely books from Bonnie arrived in the mail the Monday after Thanksgiving.  I did a quick happy dance and then dove back into the giant pile of essays, research portfolios, and other writing assignments needing to be graded/responded to (yes, I am a community college writing teacher.)  I am just now climbing my way out of that pile and posting this long overdue thank you. First of all, I […]

The Effects of Misogyny – From A(twood) to Z(umas)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

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So apparently real life isn’t depressing and dystopian enough, so I made June my month to read (and re-read) books that construct an all too believable future for women and their reproductive rights. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was my book club’s pick for June and though I don’t know if I would use the phrase “looking forward to it” to describe how I felt about re-reading this novel, I was definitely curious to revisit it.  I read the book about a year after it […]

Definitely My Wheelhouse

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

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As a reader of mysteries, I’ve always been a fan of the more hardboiled variety and especially those with a strong sense of place—George Pelecanos writing about Washington D.C., Dennis Lehane writing about Boston, James Lee Burke writing about Louisiana, and most recently, Craig Johnson writing about Absaroka County (not a real county) in Wyoming.  Well, now I can add Attica Locke to this list. Her focus is East Texas and her novels are rich and complex, featuring flawed protagonists, who find themselves in tricky […]



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