Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The burden and the gift of knowing one’s history

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes

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The Deep is a novel inspired by a song by the rappers known as clipping  (Diggs, Hutson and Snipes). It is the story of Yetu, a 34-year-old wajinru (mer-person) who serves as her people’s historian, and of the burden that this vocation entails. It is also the story of the enslaved people of the Americas and of the trauma handed down through generations. The sea-dwelling people known as wajinru were born from a traumatic experience: their foremothers were land-dwelling women who had been enslaved and […]

“something beautiful left town, and she never even knew its name”

Again, Rachel (2022) by Marian Keyes

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I haven’t been very well in the last couple of months–various new aches and pains and discomforts and a couple of random fevers; tests and scans come back OK for now; lots of “could be stress, could be anything” and late night browsing what “anything” might be (which is a bad thing to do, don’t do this). So I sought something chill to read (I’m about of a 10th of the way through Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) which is brilliant and tangled […]

One of Lau’s more forgettable novels

He's Not My Boyfriend by Jackie Lau

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Annoyed by family meddling, Iris tries to ignore her growing attraction to hot one-night-stand Alex Iris Chin is happily single and doesn’t ever want to enter into a long-term relationship, certainly not marriage. She can’t understand why her mother and grandmother are so eager to set her up, both seem to have made very poor choices in their own marriages. One-night-stands feel much more uncomplicated to Iris, but once it turns out that one of her previous hook-ups, Alex Kwong, works on the construction site […]

A very lovely romance about two complex people on the search for belonging

Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn

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4.5 stars 15-word review: Trying to get some direction in her life, Georgie turns to a new-found teenage journal Longer review: Georgie is feeling adrift. She’s worked as a personal assistant for a number of industry people in L.A, and was really good at it. Now, however, her former boss decided to retire to the countryside and doesn’t need a P.A. anymore. Georgie is free to go home to her family to realise her own dreams, the only problem is, she has no idea what […]

Oh, the foreboding!

The Marriage Portrait: A Novel by Maggie O’Farrell

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Maggie O’Farrell’s last two novels have been works of historical fiction that deal with heavy topics. In Hamnet, it was the death of William Shakespeare’s young son from the plague, and in The Marriage Portrait it is the death of the 15-year-old Duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia de’Medici, thought to have been murdered by her own husband. O’Farrell is a master of foreboding, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat while waiting for the horrid event to occur. And yet, despite the fact that […]

Life imitates art, which is inspired by quiet village life

Miss Buncle's Book by D.E. Stevenson

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15-word review: Anonymous spinster Barbara Buncle writes a book to pay the bills, her entire village rages. This witty novel, originally published in 1934, features rather plain and unassuming village spinster Barbara Buncle falling on hard times and writing a novel to make enough money to be able to pay her bills. She briefly considered keeping chickens but doesn’t like birds. As Miss Buncle hasn’t really been anywhere or experienced much outside village life, she uses her own neighbours and the village of Copperfield where […]



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