Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You are the queen. You are the queen that Antoinette wanted to be . . .”

Antoinette's Sister by Diana Giovinazzo

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CBR17 Bingo: Black – Behold, the cover. Though her tragic sister Marie Antoinette is better known today, Maria Carolina Charlotte, the queen of Naples, ruled with better success but faced her own share of troubles and tribulations in her years on the throne. The thing with historical fiction is that the story can live or die by the events it’s based on, especially when it follows the life of a historical figure. Luckily, Charlotte is an interesting main character. Though her attitudes toward the monarchy […]

An appalling, vital read

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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CBR 17 BINGO: Citizen. While Mennonite women theoretically have the same citizenship rights as anyone else in their country, this isn’t the reality for the women of Molotschna. Women Talking, adapted for film in 2022, is a fictionalized response to very real and appalling incidents that occurred in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009. During that period, more than 100 women in a remote Mennonite colony woke up to signs that they had been raped during the night. Their claims were dismissed by the colony elders: […]

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser (translator)

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 The Hour of the Star is a book that climbed onto this year’s TBR by the Read Harder Challenge. One of this year’s tasks is to read a work of literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author. So, I went to books already on my radar to see if any fit the bill and sure enough Clarice Lispector’s final book did just that (Lispector was severely injured in a fire in her 40s and nearly lost her hand). It also was a book […]

Interesting, Enjoyable, but Missing Something

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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cbr17bingo – G I liked this book. But. I think I struggle a bit with books for which I can’t quite determine the point, although I recognize they don’t necessarily need a single, clear-cut point (or that I could have just missed it). I did genuinely enjoy this novel of interlocking narratives—a style that the author tends toward. The novel is about how Jonathan Alkaitis’s Ponzi scheme affected a wide range of people, from Vincent (who maintains a throughline of the book), to his employees, […]

Town of Big Shoulders Indeed

The Third Rail by Michael Harvey

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cbr17bingo Review The Third Rail is the last of a trilogy of gritty Chicago mysteries featuring ex-cop and current PI Michael Kelly.  The first, The Chicago Way, focused on the police department.  The second, The Fifth Floor, expanded to the mayor’s office, and this last installment reached the last of the triumvirate that governs Chicago politics. But let’s start with the plot.  Random women, riding the public transportation system, are being assassinated. Many of the large U.S. cities were, in the 1990s, often a dangerous […]

Sometimes a “Hallmark Movie” type of book is just what you need

The Collected Regrets of Clover: A Novel by Mikki Brammer

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Cbr17bingo Rec’d (2 bingos) This book was a staff pick/rec at my local bookstore The Collected Regrets of Clover is a novel about death and grief and about friendship and love. Main character Clover is a 30-something living in New York. She has had a unique connection to death since she was a child, but as an adult she is now struggling with loneliness and grief. A new job and a series of events could potentially take Clover in a direction she has long desired, […]



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