Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Wanderlustful

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Lawyer by day, voracious reader by night. So many books, so little time!

Wanderlustful's Reviews:

Beautiful and Heartbreaking

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

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Set in the early 1940s, The Bluest Eye is the story of three young black girls living in Lorain, Ohio: two sisters, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, and a foster child taken in by their family, Pecola Breedlove.  The first page tells us that bad things are in store for Pecola- she becomes pregnant with her father’s baby and that baby dies- and then Claudia narrates the fall, winter and spring that lead to those events.  Interspersed in between Claudia’s chronological account of these three seasons […]

Strindberg mansplains it all

Miss Julie by August Strindberg

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In the last season of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the popular lowbrow comedienne Sophie Lennon, played by Jane Lynch, wants to prove her acting chops by starring in a theatre play of Miss Julie.  Despite rehearsal performances that are nuanced, in the actual performance Lennon plays Miss Julie as a variation on her lowbrow alter ego, to crushing reviews.  It turns out that this highbrow/lowbrow collision is one of the main themes of Miss Julie, so Lennon’s portrayal might actually have been a novel approach. […]

Mennonite #MeToo

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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Women Talking is a fictionalized story that is founded on a real story- the ‘ghost rapes’ that occurred in the Manitoba Mennonite colony in rural Bolivia between 2004 and 2009.  For years, women would awake groggy, with signs that they had been sexually assaulted.  Eventually one of the rapists is caught in the act; he confesses his role in the rapes and implicates 8 other men from the colony. Toews, who is from a Mennonite community in Canada, took this horrific story and turned it […]

Controversial but compelling

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

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My Dark Vanessa is a complicated and controversial book- it is akin to a modern retelling of Lolita from Lolita’s perspective.  Oprah picked it for her book club (cbr12bingo!) and then dropped it when controversy arose- after American Dirt she maybe wasn’t keen for another controversial book so soon (FYI: the controversy was due to allegations that Russell had stolen the real life story of a Latina woman- since disproved via Russell disclosing her own childhood abuse). The story is a first person narrative that […]

Murder she solved

The Skull Beneath the Skin by P.D. James

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The Skull Beneath the Skin is the 3rd and final novel in the brick of a P.D. James compilation I’ve been reading.  Luckily things went out on a high note as this last novel was my favourite of the three.  Unlike the previous two novels (The Black Tower and Death of an Expert Witness), The Skull Beneath the Skin is a Cordelia Gray mystery (the others featured her Scotland Yard detective, Adam Dalgliesh). The mystery in Skull Beneath the Skin kicks off after Cordelia, who […]

Lonely Hearts Club

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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Eleanor Oliphant is a 30 year old accounts worker at a graphic design firm in Glasgow, Scotland.  She is particular, organized and incredibly socially awkward, but without any desire to change herself to be liked- she is, as the title indicates, “completely fine”.  Eleanor’s life is, like her personality, particular and organized- she goes to work and then she goes home, with weekends filled by grocery store pizza and a vodka buzz.  She has no friends or family and as we get to know her […]



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