Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The weakest one of these in a while.

Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #14) by Louise Penny

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Lots of mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, I really liked the main conceit of the plot, that this old woman makes Gamache, Myrna, and a strange young man named Benedict the liquidators of her will, despite that none of them knew her. The woman, who called herself the Baroness, had a strange and interesting past, and as often happens in these books, a murder occurs. The B-plot of the book follows Cadet Amelia Choquet after she is expelled from the academy […]

Heartwood

Greenwood by Michael Christie

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I have not been able to sit still and read for a long time. With the pandemic, my mind can rarely engage with a book for any sort of marathon session. Michael Christie has figured out the antidote, at least for me, with his tightly packed, well-plotted and bracing book about four generations of the Greenwood family. His narrative inspired me to reflect on my own long family history in this country, to consider the things I do and don’t know for certain about my […]

“you girl and you boy and that’s fine with me, but what’s not fine is you selling yourself short”

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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Jonny is an open wound: raw, glistening, spilling over, and beautiful in a way that makes you unable to turn away even though you should. It’s a wound sustained from getting too drunk at a casino and crashing through a plate glass window. It glitters, it throbs, and it is going to be expensive to clean up. He invites us into his life like a tornado introduces itself to a neighborhood. We crash through, turning everything on end at a break-neck pace. Jonny is the […]

“Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?”

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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I worked three jobs in the summer of 2005. I frequently worked more than one during any given day. Days off did not exist- except, miraculously, for the 4th of July. The history of the 4th holds no meaning here, just that I finally had a day to myself. I spent my one day off in bed, reading The Handmaid’s Tale from cover to cover. I did not leave the room. I turned down, much to the chagrin of the person whose bed it was, all opportunities […]

A book and a protagonist who are many things at once

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood is nothing if not a hardworking novelist, and often something of a genre chameleon: she has made her work in science fiction with the MadAddam trilogy, dystopian fiction with The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, literary retellings with The Penelopiad and Hag-Seed, and historical fiction with works like The Blind Assassin. Alias Grace, her 1996 Booker-finalist novel, is another of her forays into historical fiction, and it showcases Atwood at the top of her game, with a subtle, elusive narrative that employs narrative uncertainty and distinctive character voices, as well as […]

The culmination of nine books of story.

How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #9) by Louise Penny

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This is the closest I have ever been to giving one of these books five stars. I think I might have even done it if I’d been able to read the book faster, but since I was stuck with audio CD’s from my library, which I could only listen to in my car, my time with the story stretched out and I was able to think about it more rationally than I would have if were sitting on my couch frantically turning pages to find […]



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