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:

Evil Woman

Old Soul by Susan Barker

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Old Soul by Susan Barker is a terrifying novel about a malevolent, otherworldly force that is transmitted to victims via a mysterious, shapeshifting woman over decades and centuries. I am not usually someone who finds supernatural themes all that convincingly scary, but Old Soul really got me. As the jacket blurb states, Jake and Mariko meet by chance and discover that they have lost a friend and family member respectively. Both Lena (Jake’s friend) and Hiroji (Mariko’s twin brother) act erratically, cruelly, and dangerously after […]

Family Traditions

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister

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Set in West Virginia (everyone’s favorite state for backwoods traditions, it seems), The Bog Wife details a tradition held by the Haddesley family through generations. It goes something like this: when the family patriarch is dying, he must be sacrificed to the bog. His entire family must carry him to the bog on a wood plank and leave him. After his body is subsumed by the bog, the eldest son must return naked and use a dowsing rod to summon a bog wife. This bog […]

Dreams of a Misogynist

Dream Girl by Laura Lippman

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Dream Girl is the fourth Laura Lippman book I’ve read after Lady in the Lake, Prom Mom, and Sunburn. DG is now up there with Prom Mom as my favorite so far, not least because the female characters get their revenge on the men who have wronged them. Dream Girl is the story of Gerry Andersen, a successful writer who has moved to Baltimore from NYC to care for his dementia-ridden mother, who then suddenly dies as Gerry is moving into his new apartment. Lippman, […]

The Message

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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My first book of 2025 (I actually began reading it on 12/30/24) and it Is a doozy. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message is primarily interested in the ways that language shapes power and resistance. The introductory section, “Journalism Is Not a Luxury,” addresses just that: the essential role in language and journalism, recording history, in fighting injustice. Coates addresses an unnamed “you” in this section, but this part seems to serve as a thesis statement about writing: “You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And […]



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