Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Nancy Drew: Girl Detective, White Whale

The Secret of the Old Clock: Nancy Drew Mystery #1 by Carolyn Keene, Mildred Benson

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Cbr13bingo White Whale I somehow managed to make it into my 6th decade having never read a single Nancy Drew book. I have always been somewhat ashamed of this given how great an impact Nancy Drew novels have had on so many women. It’s even more shocking and shameful when I recall that growing up, there were dozens of the Nancy Drew novels in my bedroom closet!! My sister read them all, and I’m pretty sure my mom and aunts had read them when they […]

This is US History 101 not CRT

Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 2nd edition by Ida B. Wells

The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States by Ida B. Wells

The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition by Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, I. Garland Penn, F.L. Barnett

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CBR13bingo Uncannon Ida B. Wells is one of the most important and influential civil rights crusaders in US history, and yet I never learned her name in school. Born into slavery, orphaned as a teen, she became a world-renowned journalist who devoted her life to fighting US lynching laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exposing the truth about the victims and perpetrators of these heinous acts. As she fought to educate the world about the plight of Blacks in the US, she […]

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life, the facts of life.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

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Cbr13bingo/People At some point in my teenaged years, I think I might have read Northanger Abbey. I know I went through an intense Austen phase after reading Pride and Prejudice, and that I had a collection of all Austen’s novels, but I certainly didn’t remember the particulars of this one upon re-reading it, which simply added to the delight in this encounter. Northanger Abbey was one of Austen’s earlier novels but it was not published until after her death. It’s a rom-com/coming of age story that […]

Kind of a disappointment

The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks

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I love historical fiction and Geraldine Brooks has been one of my favorite writers in this genre. I have now officially read all of her novels. The Secret Chord (2015) is about one of the most famous men in history, King David. Very little factual information exists about him, and in this novel, Brooks imagines his rise to power and rule through the eyes of his advisor/seer, the prophet Natan. Natan has witnessed David’s ruthlessness firsthand, but he also senses David’s strong connection to the […]

“Today I am choosing to love the person in front of me.”

They Went Left by Monica Hesse

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A few years ago, I reviewed Monica Hesse’s YA novel Girl in the Blue Coat, a story of intrigue and mystery set amongst the resistance in Amsterdam during WWII. It was an excellent novel, and Hesse has done it again with They Went Left. This YA novel features another teenaged girl as protagonist, but this time the story is set in the immediate aftermath of the war. Nazis exterminated Zofia’s parents, grandmother and aunt, and they nearly killed her as well. She is suffering from […]

A novel for Juneteenth

Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether

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As I started to write this review, I did a little search on Louise Meriwether and it turns out the NYT ran a story on her today. I first heard of Meriwether only recently, which seems to be a common story despite the fact that Meriwether’s much lauded first novel Daddy Was a Number Runner was published in 1970. Did you know that there is a prize in her name? The Louise Meriwether First Book Prize …was founded in 2016 to honor author Louise Meriwether […]



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