Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Tracy

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40-something psychologist living with a husband, toddler, and 2 cats.

Tracy's Reviews:

Not Enough Beatrice and Benedick, Way Too Much Claudio

Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare

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cbr17bingo – play (spoilers aplenty ahead) I hate Claudio. I feel like that shouldn’t be my takeaway from this play, but here we are. The play centers largely on Claudio and Hero, who early in the play are engaged to be wed. Beatrice and Benedick are the secondary enemies-to-lovers couple, but I can certainly see why some productions of the play choose to emphasize their role because by modern-day standards, the Claudio/Hero relationship is somewhat unpalatable. Claudio is a favorite of the prince Don Pedro, […]

Not Quite What I Was Expecting

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen

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I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. It seems like it’s supposed to satirize reality TV, particularly The Bachelor type shows. In this case, the show is called The Catch, and we’re down to the final 4 contestants competing for a scummy D-lister. I think my problem is that the book didn’t go far enough with the satire. The characters read as one-note instead of the exaggerated characters they could have been or perhaps were supposed to be. The exception was Renee, who was a […]

No Wings Needed, but Maybe a Better Editor?

We Need No Wings by Ann Dávila Cardinal

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cbr17bingo – Rec’d (found on a list of book suggestions for National Hispanic Heritage Month) I’m going to let the first line of the book do some heavy lifting here: “The first time Tere Sánchez levitated, she was in the garden.” Tere is a 60-year-old widow who has been grieving her husband’s death for the past year while taking a leave from her work as a professor. Understandably, the levitation freaks her out. She recalls that her family is distantly related to Saint Teresa of […]

Being Home Sick = Lots of Time to Read

The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty

A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

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cbr17bingo – TBR (for The City of Brass) and my 3rd BINGO The City of Brass This has been on my TBR for ages, and I’m glad I finally got to it. It’s a Middle Eastern-inspired historical fantasy that follows the POVs of Nahri, a con woman living in Cairo when we first meet her, and Ali, the younger son of the ruling family of Daevabad (the titular city of brass). While he doesn’t get his own POV chapters, Dara is another important character rounding […]

Interesting, Enjoyable, but Missing Something

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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cbr17bingo – G I liked this book. But. I think I struggle a bit with books for which I can’t quite determine the point, although I recognize they don’t necessarily need a single, clear-cut point (or that I could have just missed it). I did genuinely enjoy this novel of interlocking narratives—a style that the author tends toward. The novel is about how Jonathan Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme affected a wide range of people, from Vincent (who maintains a throughline of the book), to his employees, […]

Silent—and Silenced—Stories

The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri

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cbr17bingo: migrant I knew little about Iran and nothing about refugees prior to reading this memoir, which is an important, and at times distressing, book. Dina Nayeri primarily writes about her family’s flight from Iran, with the book broken into five sections that correspond to elements of this flight: Escape, Camp, Asylum, Assimilation, and Cultural Repatriation. Told from a non-linear perspective and interspersed with stories of other refugees’ lives, Nayeri depicts the arduous, often trauma-filled journey that refugees go on and the long-lasting impact of […]



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