Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About lowercasesee

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I've been told I have a reading problem. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: lowercasesee's Quick Questions interview.)

lowercasesee's Reviews:

Tough book, mercifully short

The Nickle Boys by Colson Whitehead

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The thing about The Nickel Boys that the reader cannot be allowed to forget is that while this book is technically a work of fiction, the school it is based on was absolutely real. Forensic archaeologists are still unearthing unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a segregated reform school in Florida. Colson Whitehead fictionalizes true stories and that makes them no easier to take. This book centers on the Nickel Academy, the unfortunate reform school to which young […]

No, they weren’t all prostitutes

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

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The popular narrative is that Jack the Ripper stalked and murdered five prostitutes in Victorian London. The story has always been about him and his mystery, a sensationalized true crime tale meant to scandalize and, at the time, act as a bit of a warning – be a good girl, and he won’t come for you. With The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold seeks to rectify this by removing him from the story almost entirely. Instead, she […]

Exploration of the self in new places

The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay

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I’ve fallen behind on my reviews again, so please bear with me. The library dumped a lot of books on me at once which is far from a terrible problem but a bit of an issue as I attempted to tear through the lot while mainlining the final season of Orange is the New Black. I can do this. The Far Field is the story of Shalini, a young woman from Bangalore, told across two periods of her life – her past and her present. Her […]

A reflection on a gentleman

A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles

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I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book with such a localized setting. With the exception of one scene and a very few pages at the end, A Gentleman In Moscow takes place in a single building – the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. In the early 1920s in Russia, Alexander is a young relic, an aristocrat who survived the Bolshevik Revolution. The state wants to punish him but not kill him and thus he is placed under house arrest in the attic rooms of this luxury […]

Interesting premise, unsatisfying ending

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta

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My library has added a new category and it is all too terrifying: cli-fi. Climate fiction. It’s like sci-fi, but the “what if” hits a little closer to home – earth, but under more severe impacts of climate change. An earth in which we are all climate refugees. It’s not pretty. It’s also a genre I don’t usually read, because it’s new. In the world of Memory of Water, fresh water no longer runs free. After continents are devastated by ocean rises, the new government that develops […]

A lot of book, but worth it

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

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This is not a small book. I read it on Kindle so I didn’t fully realize it, but The Priory of the Orange Tree is a solid 800 pages. This book could have been a pair of full-size novels. But having been impatiently waiting on George R.R. Martin to finish A Song of Ice and Fire, I’m not entirely mad that Shannon opted to wrap this all up in one go. Priory is standalone epic fantasy and boy is it epic. The novel covers continents and fills them with […]



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