Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Unpainted Huffhines

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I love to read, one of the many personality traits I've inherited from my dad. My family lost him to cancer in September 2021.

Unpainted Huffhines's Reviews:

You know the cliche about history…

A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

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Yeah, the one about not knowing it and being doomed to repeat it? Well, here’s exhibit number bajillion, Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. This likely sounds familiar to you: a man of ill repute, shady origin, and gross appetites seeks to capitalize on the population’s racist and xenophobic impulses by becoming the head of a large organization; along the way he makes a lot of money by extorting […]

A Dark Story That Deserves a Better Storyteller

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

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Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls is, at first glance, a long-overdue study of the early twentieth century female factory workers who were hired to paint watch dials and hands with radium paint. Moore focuses on the workers at two plants, one in Newark, New Jersey, and one in Ottawa, Illinois. The women were encouraged, in fact required to “lip point,” to put the uranium-coated paintbrushes in their mouths to wet them and create the necessary fine point for the watches. Bosses never told them that radium could […]

Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering Heights….

The Favorites by Layne Fargo

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Layne Fargo with The Favorites is trying to do what Barbara Kingsolver did with Demon Copperhead: take a literary classic and update it for a 21st-century audience. Some readers dislike Demon Copperhead for what they see as its forays into trauma porn and its sadistic treatment of the main character. For the record, I love DC. But no matter what you think of Kingsolver’s novel, it’s a work of genius compared to The Favorites. Admittedly, the scope is a bit different. While Demon Copperhead uses Dickens’ David Copperfield as a framework to explore the […]

Well, that escalated….

Havoc by Christopher Bollen

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… not quickly. But once it gets going, boy howdy. CW: animal death, sexual abuse Christopher Bollen’s Havoc is narrated by octogenarian widow Maggie Burkhardt, who has taken up more or less permanent residence in a once grand, now kind of rundown hotel in Luxor, Egypt at the height of the COVID pandemic. Maggie is the self-appointed grande dame of the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel: she knows all of the other guests and has ingratiated herself with the staff, especially the kindly concierge Ahmed, who allows Maggie […]

The Horror of History

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

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What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I am the worst dream America ever had. (163) Much of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is in the vein of a lot of his work: a horror novel that is concerned with Native identity and its history in America. In the SGJ books I’ve read (The Only Good Indians, the Indian Lake trilogy, I Was a Teenage Slasher), that Native identity is a contemporary one. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, on the other hand, tackles a real-life […]

Water, Fire, and Blood

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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“White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, choose they house. They get to make black babies, then disappear into thin air like wasn’t never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell ’em; now they just send ’em to prison like they did my daddy, so that they can’t be with they kids.” Homegoing by […]



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