Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When the coconuts are the most interesting part of the vampire story

A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal

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Bingo 10: Migrant More than one important character in A Tempest of Tea appears to have migrated due to war/colonization/etc. to the main location of White Roaring, Ettenia. The effects of colonial violence is a actually a theme in the story, so here it is in the corner top square. I figured that a story featuring a street-wise crook (that’s Artie) and her crew, vampires, and political tensions might get a little dark, but yikes, both to the violence and the suggestions for the sequel. […]

You are all Dead Spirits

Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People by Darren Rix; Craig Cormick

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So as a school kid in Australia back in the nineties, I remember being taught, like many of my peers, the Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia. Except that wasn’t quite true, was it? To add all the qualifiers, Cook and his crew are probably best described as the first set of Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia …after the dutch sort of poked around in the west.  But very little discussion time was given to the people that had lived in Australia for tens […]

Who has the right to history?

The Memory Hunters by Mia Tsai

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The Memory Hunters fulfills the “red” square for CBR17 Bingo. I really enjoyed Mia Tsai’s Bitter Medicine, and was very excited to try The Memory Hunters, which is a completely new world and setting. It is set in a type of near future where climate change has resulted in much of the coast as we know it being devastated and swallowed by the ocean and storms, and fungi being used as a way to collect and remember history. It opens when Kiana Strade, a memory […]

“She writes that she will walk across the ocean to be with her lover. He sees this, not as a declaration of love, but as a statement of a single-mindedness so total that a kind of grandeur creeps into it.”

In Pursuit of Love: A Journey in the Footsteps of Obsession by Mark Bostridge

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CBR17 Bingo: I – Re: the title. Victor Hugo was the most famous writer in the world when his daughter, Adèle, left their home in Guernsey on a years-long mad pursuit of a former lover. Centuries later, author Mark Bostridge retraces her steps and tries to understand her obsession in the prism of his own life. I have not seen acclaimed 1975 film The Story of Adele H., so this was my first real acquaintance with the strange life of Adèle Hugo, whose story was […]

Popular Doesn’t Mean Good

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

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Bingo: Black I feel a little guilty saying this, but I was singularly unmoved by Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I feel guilty because the book was trying so hard, and so obviously, to strike the reader’s heart. But no matter what happened, what threats were faced, what deaths were shown, I could not squeeze out an ounce of caring. The book’s narrator is death. His attention is captured by a young girl named Leisel, who he calls the book thief for her irresistible urge […]

Wherever You Go, There You Are

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

Kiss Her Goodbye by Lisa Gardner

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CBR17 Bingo: Migrant – Both books involve characters who move to places they expect no one knows them and try, with varying success, to rebuild themselves into new shapes. The Killer Question by Janice Hallett – 5 stars Sue and Mal run a perfectly average British pub with an above average weekly quiz night, but the arrival of a mysterious new team that dominates the competition and the discovery of a body in the nearby river sends their lives into a tailspin. This is my […]



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