Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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

Wanderlustful's Reviews:

Everybody wants to rule the world

When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt by Kara Cooney

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Kara Cooney is an Egyptologist and National Geographic explorer with an interest in women’s roles in ancient Egypt. This book is a taster tour of the rise and fall of 6 of Egypt’s female rulers, the most famous of which are Cleopatra, Hatshepsut and Nefertiti. Before I read this I was passingly familiar with these three but had never heard of the others she features (Merneith, Neferusobek and Tawosret). The timelines covered are broad- Merneith was the first of the six and she ruled in […]

Only murders in the retirement home

Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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Oh this was so fun! Set in Coopers Chase, a posh retirement home in rural England, four retirees with formidable skills from their former professions (a civil servant/spy, a psychiatrist, a union boss, a police officer) gather every Thursday to try to solve cold case mysteries or files that still nag at them. When one of their members becomes to ill to participate, they introduce a new member, Joyce, whose diary entries form a good chunk of the novel. Returning to a full complement of […]

The North Becomes Her

Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

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Tanya Tagaq is an Inuit artist from Canada’s Arctic. She’s best known as a musician for her albums/ performances of throat singing, where she takes traditional Inuit throat singing and makes it her own; she has been nominated and won a number of Canadian music awards. In addition to music, Tagaq writes and her first work, Split Tooth, was published several years ago. It was long listed for the Giller Prize (Canada’s best known literary award) and for an Amazon best first novel award. Split […]

What if we’re underwhelmed instead?

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

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Karen Joy Fowler’s book starts in the middle with a bang, with her main character, Rosemary Cooke, away at college and undergoing some youthful rebellion. Rosemary tells us of what seems like her idyllic early life back in the mid-west: she has two loving parents, an older brother, Lowell, and a younger sister, Fern. Lowell is someone to look up to while Fern is Rosemary’s shadow half- they are raised to do everything together, dressed in matching outfits and speak in their own language. Rosemary […]

Cozy Botswanan Mystery

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

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This is the first novel in the eponymous long-running series (22 books over 20+ years) by Alexander McCall Smith. It introduces us to Mma Precious Ramotswe, a canny and capable Botswanan woman who takes her inheritance from her father to start a detective agency in Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone. Rather than a single mystery, the novel is structured more like short stories with overlapping characters, albeit progressing in time- each chapter is a new small mystery for Mma Ramotswe to solve. This first installment […]

I Just Can’t Quit This Series

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

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I know, I know, I KNOW. My once-beloved J.K. Rowling, writing here under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, has fallen off the deep end, writing some despicable things about transgender people. Sigh. Does it make it better that I didn’t buy this, just borrowed it from the library? I’m still not sure, and I’m not sure about where the line is between art/the artist, especially with a book like this one where a cross-dressing villain is featured… Because I don’t have any great answers, or new […]



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