Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I’ll never be a footnote in someone else’s story. Everyone I meet is destined to be a footnote in my story.”

Dava Shastri’s Last Day: A Novel by Kirthana Ramisetti

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Dava Shastri’s Last Day is a fascinating novel with a provocative premise. Dava Shastri, age 70, is dying and decides to fake her own death so that she can see what the obituaries will say about her before she goes. You see, Dava Shastri is famous. She is one of the wealthiest women in the world, having made a name for herself in the music industry and as a philanthropist. She has been focused on her legacy for much of her life and expects to […]

A tale as old as time

The Women of Troy: A Novel by Pat Barker

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The Women of Troy is the follow up to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, her imagining of the Trojan War/Iliad from the point of view of the women and girls who saw their city fall and became enslaved to their enemies. The focal point remains Briseis, pregnant with Achilles’ child, with a few chapters from the view of Achilles’ teenaged son Pyrrhus. This novel finds its characters stuck in a sort of limbo; the war is over, the Greeks victorious but unable to […]

How a victim is made a villain

Grown by Tiffany D. Jackson

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Three years ago, I reviewed Tiffany D. Jackson’s YA novel Monday’s Not Coming. It’s one of those novels that stays with you long after you’ve read it due to the tragic subject matter and Jackson’s excellent writing. Grown, published in 2020, is another powerful YA novel that tackles disturbing subject matter taken from today’s headlines. This time, Jackson writes a story inspired by R. Kelly and the abuse of young Black girls at the hands of a powerful and famous man. This is not an […]

“Now he carried the past with him rather than being carried on the back of the brute that was his history.”

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley

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If you were beginning to sense the onset of dementia and had the chance to take a drug that would clear your mind for a short period of time but then cause your death, would you take it? Ninety-one-year-old Ptolemy Grey doesn’t hesitate when offered the chance because he knows he has something important he is supposed to do before he dies and needs to remember what it is. This short 2010 novel by Walter Mosley is a touching reflection on memory, history and what […]

It was the worst of times

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

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Fingersmith is award winning historical fiction set in 1862 London and at a country manor known as Briar. Like a Dickens novel, it features thieves, asylums, poor, rich and table turning, but this work also focuses on women, sex, matters of power/agency and the lack thereof.  The story is told in three parts: two from point of view of Sue Trinder, a 17-year-old orphan and fingersmith (thief), and one from point of view of 17-year-old Maud Lilly, who is an orphan and an heiress. Both […]

How I Met Your Monster

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter: The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club Book 1 by Theodora Goss

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This YA novel, the first in a trilogy, introduces the reader to the members of the Athena Club. It is their origin story. What is the Athena Club? It is a group of young women in London ca. 1900 who have one thing in common — a monstrous past! They are Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Catherine Moreau, Justine Frankenstein and Beatrice Rappaccini. A series of gruesome murders of prostitutes will bring these young women together with a little help from none other than Sherlock Holmes […]



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