Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

“Life is a peculiar venture”

Amongst Women by John McGahern

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(Novel reviewed for the “Shadow” square of CBR Bingo.) “What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family working in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.” I’ve studied (and taught) a good bit of Irish poetry and drama, but I’ve come to feel that Irish fiction represented a nagging gap in my knowledge. So I decided that […]

Another dose of comfort reading

A Sunlit Weapon by Jacqueline Winspear

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“You only have to visit a battlefield long after a war has ended, to know that places are never quite the same following a tragedy.” I got seriously into Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books during the darkest days of lockdown, and now, alas, I am hooked, even though at 17 installments in the series, it’s not quite as fresh as it was. But I like Maisie and her desire to do right by the survivors as she investigates the murders: this series takes seriously the […]

is it too late to change your ways?

L.A. Weather by Maria Amparo Escandon

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I’ve got high expectations for novels set in Southern California. If very little besides, say, the beaches and Hollywood register for the writer in question, maybe also some smog and traffic, I judge that hard. If you can’t say “I’d take the 101 to the 10 to the 405 for you” and understand that as an expression of love, write about somewhere else, please. So one thing I liked very immediately about Maria Amparo Escandon’s L.A. Weather was the real sense of place. This isn’t just LA, […]

a wilderness suspense novel with an aching heart

Small Game by Blair Braverman

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I’ve usually got so much to read that I don’t really bother with NetGalley in an effort to get my hands on ARCs. Better that they go to people who do have time to read them, and may also actually review them. But I’ve been following Blair Braverman, writer and dogsledder, on Twitter for years now and have read both her memoir, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, and her Tough Love column for Outside magazine; obviously I have also loved her many Twitter threads about her […]

an excellent introduction to the history of the Black church in America

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song by Henry Louis Gates, Jr

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As a practicing Christian, I’ve been trying over the past couple years to add more voices into my understanding of my faith, both theology and history, and this book, the companion to PBS’s recent documentary miniseries of the same title, was part of that slow ongoing project. It paired interestingly with Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise, another recent read that focused on the white Christianity’s long history of complicity with racism; Gates, however, focuses on the agency of Black Christians in articulating their faith and […]

the many forms of love that shape life and fate

The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh

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Alright, so Iron Widow was not my jam (to my disappointment). I was really hoping that the next of my library audiobook holds would turn things around, and Axie Oh’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea came to me next. And oh, this one is my jam. Or at any rate, it hits a lot of sweet spots for me and I enjoyed it tremendously. (Not burying the lede this time, either, obviously.) The novel is not exactly a retelling of the Korean folktale “Shim Cheong” (apparently […]



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