Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A daring and brilliant escape

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo

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I found Master Slave Husband Wife (2023) by Ilyon Woo on NPR’s Favorite Books List. It is the true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped from slavery in Georgia in 1848. I thought this book was solely about their escape, but Woo also describes the families of Ellen and William, their enslavers, as well as a significant time period after their escape. On the whole, I thought this book was well-written and interesting–although the pace lags in a couple of places. If you’ve only taken U.S. […]

Suffering on the high seas

The Wager by David Grann

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I first saw The Wager (2023) by David Grann on Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023 list. I’m a big fan of Obama, and I read a number of his recommended books every year. I also read The Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann about five years ago. It was a deep dive into a little corner of history that I knew almost nothing about, and I found it very interesting. The Wager is also something of a deep dive into a little corner of history. The Wager was […]

“The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved.”

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

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I read The Vaster Wilds (2023) by Lauren Groff because it was on Obama’s Favorite Books list last year. I have found that Barack Obama has great taste in literature (although I often skip over the biographies he recommends because they are just too long). I’ve read Florida by Lauren Groff and had mixed feelings about it. The Vaster Wilds is my first full-length novel by Groff, and I was impressed. This story takes place in the winter of 1609-1610 in the Jamestown colony when […]

Historical middle grade with unions!

The Pecan Sheller by Lupe Ruiz-Flores

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The Pecan Sheller is set during the late 1930s and follows Petra, a thirteen-year-old girl who has to leave school and get a job shelling pecans after her father’s death in order to help her Amá pay the bills and take care of Petra’s younger siblings. While working in the pecan factory, Petra makes new friends, but also is confronted with terrible working conditions and seeing many people get tuberculosis and die. When one of her new friends dies and the factory owners want to […]

And they all fall down.

The Fall of the House of Usher: A Graphic Novel by Edgar Allen Poe and Raul Garcia

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My 624 and a full 12 Cannonball review is actually one that is a bit lackluster. Now, I enjoy a good Edgar Allen Poe as much as the next English Major Casual Fan, but The Fall of the House of Usher: A Graphic Novel (adapted and illustrated by Raul Garcia) is not one of my favorites. However, as it is adapted into the graphic novel format, I felt it would be a better way to understand the story (The Lottery by Shirly Jackson has been […]

“She was a nice girl from a good family.”

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid

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As Head Overseer of the woman’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maria Mandl was the highest-ranked female perpetrator of the Holocaust. In this book, author Eischeid examines how she came to reach this position, and more broadly the role of women in the Nazi killing machine. The architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust that most people are familiar with are male, but female Nazi party members played a major role in running the concentration camps too. Though the vast majority of them managed to slip back into […]



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