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:

We Don’t Ever Leave the Old World Behind. We Just Create a New One.

Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven

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A delightful way to officially begin my 2019 reading year.  This novel by Jennifer Niven was part of a pile of YA novels I checked out of my college’s library before winter break and so far it’s been my favorite.  Similar to her first novel, All the Bright Places, this novel focuses on the developing relationship between two Indiana high school students, and the story is told by both characters in alternating chapters. Libby Strout is excited and dreading her first day of school since […]

2018 – I Can’t Quit You

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This last year, like many Cannonballers, I read more books than I got a chance to review and so this final review of 2018, which will end up being my first review of 2019, is a sort of odds and ends.  Here in no particular order are books that I read while in China, books I read while on vacation in Northern Wisconsin, and books I read during my fall and spring semesters that I just didn’t have time to write about at the time. […]

Turning Silver Into Gold

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

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I was so excited to get Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik as part of the book exchange because I loved Uprooted and had read and enjoyed the first book in Novik’s Temeraire series this summer. This is a loose (very loose) retelling of Rumpelstiltskin set in a past both realistic and imaginary and involving three young women.  Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, and she takes over her father’s business when his inability to demand payment leaves her family almost destitute and her […]

Imagine that you are the type of girl who can cope with it, even if you’re not

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This is another novel I picked up thanks to an Audie Cornish interview with Michael Donkor that I heard on NPR’s All Things Considered while driving home earlier this fall.  I came in right as they were talking about Donkor’s ear for language, and the rhythms of different accents are one of the many things that stood out to me in the novel as well as the interweaving of expressions in Twi, a Ghanaian dialect. It’s a story about relationships—one is between Belinda, a 17-year-old […]

Books I Want to Talk About with my Friend, the Classics Professor

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Thanks to all the Cannonball Read folks who raved about Madeline Miller this year.  Because of the accolades, I read The Song of Achilles back in May and Circe in November and both were books that engaged and transported me.  Thanks to my procrastinating ways, I decided to review both books together and because they’ve been reviewed by a lot of folks already, I thought I’d talk more about my experience reading them and spare you the plot summary. I read Song of Achilles on my […]

No Danger of a Simple Story

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Like many books that I pick up, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones ended up on my to-read list after I heard a story on NPR.  Interviewed by Karen Grigsby-Bates last February, Jones said she had done a lot of research on criminal justice and race to prepare to write a book but that nothing was clicking until she went home to visit her mom over the holidays and overheard a conversation in an Atlanta mall: JONES: The woman was beautifully dressed, and the young man, he […]



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