Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It’s like “Oklahoma!” But for Texas

Simon the Fiddler: A Novel by Paulette Jiles

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In one of the many end-of-year best books lists that came out in December, I saw this novel mentioned. The reviewer said that it was set at the end of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath in Texas and featured an itinerant fiddler and an Irish servant who fall in love but are separated. I do enjoy historical fiction and this is a time period about which I know very little, so it seemed like an entertaining way to get a sense of the […]

A rather Gothic mystery

The Anatomist's Wife by Anna Lee Huber

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“The scream froze me in my tracks, but the shout that followed propelled me out of my indecision and around the hedge line of the maze…Lady Godwin lay draped across a stone bench, her eyes stared sightlessly into the night sky and her mouth seemed frozen open on a scream.” “Death was not unfamiliar to me.  I had seen more than my fair share of corpses in my lifetime…so I hardly relished the appearance of yet another one, and in my sister’s garden no less. […]

A novel of grief

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell

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This could very well end up as one of my favorites for 2021. O’Farrell’s novel imagines the death of William Shakespeare’s young son Hamnet and the grief the envelops the family as a result. I could not put this book down, it is so beautifully written and heart wrenching. While Shakespeare is a character in the novel (never named but obviously him), the main character is Agnes, his wife and mother to Hamnet, Hamnet’s twin Judith and Susannah. It is mainly through her eyes that […]

Actions have consequences

Whirligig by Paul Fleischman

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My niece sent me this novel recently because she’d heard of it through her students and thought I might find it interesting both as a reading project and potential art project inspiration for my son. She was right on both counts! This is a short YA novel from 1998 about a young man who learns that “actions have consequences,” a message displayed on the book’s cover. While we have all heard that (or said it) at some time, usually as a warning against dangerous or […]



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