Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Talking Without Speaking, Hearing Without Listening

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

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CBR11 Bingo Square: Birthday Originally I wanted to read Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere for the birthday bingo square, but since our library had this book available first, I figured it was worth a read. And it certainly hit on a few soft spots in my heart along the way. Emotions? Yeah, I have those in spades, and this book absolutely brought some of them out. Everything I Never Told You centers on a mixed-race Chinese American family named the Lee’s in the 1970’s, whose […]

Exploring a Family Tragedy and How Things Left Unsaid Fester

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

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I’d meant to read this for a while, but somehow ended up reading Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, first.  While this one didn’t have quite the same impact as her follow up, it was still a very good novel, and I really enjoyed the complexity she brought to all the characters, their motivations, and how she portrayed how even well meaning actions could have negative and long lasting impacts. As the novel begins, the Lee family is going through their normal morning routine in […]

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules… was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things.”

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Celeste Ng seems to like to write books where it seems like they start with a mystery or crime scene, but the book isn’t really about the mystery. Things don’t get solved. People don’t get closure or absolution. You’re led to the end as a reader, but you feel just as lost as the characters surely do. Here’s the summary bit from Goodreads: In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to […]

Where do we really belong?

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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This is quite a hard book to review.  It’s basically the story of two families.  The Richardson’s are long established in Shaker Heights, both parents work, one a journalist; one a lawyer and they have four children at high school, all close in age.  The perfect American family.   Enter Mia and her daughter, Pearl.  They are itinerant travelers, having lived in 46 places in Pearl’s 15 years.  Mia is an artist, a photographer to be precise, who sells her photographs through a gallery in New […]

…sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over

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Just enough time to slip a review in under the wire! This is a book club book for me and I was looking forward to reading it. I liked it, but didn’t love it, which was a surprise given all of the great reviews it received.  It took me a while to read, but really shouldn’t have.  It’s not a long or complicated book.  I’m not sure if that was because I was fitting it in around holiday goings on or if it wasn’t engaging […]

Book Roundup

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I have a few books I’ve been putting off reviewing simply because I don’t have much to say about them. That isn’t necessarily because I didn’t like them, I just can’t come up with a lot of words for them. So, I’m going to do a bit of a “at a loss for words round up” and get these in the bank. I’ll put the link to my favorite in the Amazon link box. Little Fires Everywhere (4 Stars) by Celeste Ng Pearl and Maya […]



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