Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Steel Magnolias but with a Vampire

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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Strong southern women are no joke. But neither is the patriarchy and racism. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix will give you goosebumps and make you angry at racial injustice and stupid white men at the same time. Set in the 90s in South Caroline, each chapter title is a reference to a movie or true crime book from the last 50 years, so you will definitely come out of this book with some ideas for what to read or […]

“I go to the grave shared by my father and Jimmy. The question I get most, the one I hate, is why I went into his room. And why I helped people. Again and again, ‘Why did you do it? How?’ The answer is, How could I not?” (Bingo#1)

All the Young Men: a memoir of love, AIDS, and chosen family in the American South by Ruth Coker Burks, Kevin Carr O'Leary

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I read a lot of memoirs; I love listening to someone tell me their story. All the Young Men tells Ruth Coker Burks’ story as a young single mother in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who finds herself driven to the forefront of the AIDS crisis and becoming an activist in the fight against AIDS. Coker Burks story starts in the way that I think many of us hope we would respond – while visiting her friend recovering from cancer surgery, she notices nurses drawing straws to […]

“And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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In one word: Grieving Cannonball Read Bingo: Uncannon I picked this for uncannon because Gyasi is giving new life to a story that we’ve seen many times over from the Eurocentric white perspective. There have been plenty of books about drug addiction (even specifically about Oxycontin and the havoc it is wreaking in America), mental illness, the crossroads of science and religion in academia, and an overachieving character trying to fix her heart by using her head. She is taking very familiar tropes and given […]

A family saga that isn’t so Black and White

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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Desiree and Stella Vignes are twin Black girls who grow up in 1940s Louisiana. They are from a very, very small town that has valued lighter skin for generations, and Desiree and Stella are very light. Wanted to escape their small town, Deisree and Stella run away from home to New Orleans to try and find their own paths in life away from what their community has decided for them. It is there that Stella decides to run away from her sister and begin passing […]

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

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In 2015 I read Ward’s Men We Reaped and I was fascinated with the way Ward’s language in a memoir was tinged with a bit of magical realism, and also just a larger than life feeling. At the time I put Ward on my radar – this was an author I was interested in a further relationship with. Once reviews for her 2017 work Sing, Unburied, Sing started coming in I knew this would be the one. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a big, award-winning book […]



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