Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It’s like “Oklahoma!” But for Texas

Simon the Fiddler: A Novel by Paulette Jiles

by 2 Comments

In one of the many end-of-year best books lists that came out in December, I saw this novel mentioned. The reviewer said that it was set at the end of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath in Texas and featured an itinerant fiddler and an Irish servant who fall in love but are separated. I do enjoy historical fiction and this is a time period about which I know very little, so it seemed like an entertaining way to get a sense of the […]

A novel of grief

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell

by 6 Comments

This could very well end up as one of my favorites for 2021. O’Farrell’s novel imagines the death of William Shakespeare’s young son Hamnet and the grief the envelops the family as a result. I could not put this book down, it is so beautifully written and heart wrenching. While Shakespeare is a character in the novel (never named but obviously him), the main character is Agnes, his wife and mother to Hamnet, Hamnet’s twin Judith and Susannah. It is mainly through her eyes that […]

Actions have consequences

Whirligig by Paul Fleischman

by 5 Comments

My niece sent me this novel recently because she’d heard of it through her students and thought I might find it interesting both as a reading project and potential art project inspiration for my son. She was right on both counts! This is a short YA novel from 1998 about a young man who learns that “actions have consequences,” a message displayed on the book’s cover. While we have all heard that (or said it) at some time, usually as a warning against dangerous or […]

Where it started, how it’s going/Cannonball

Markings by Dag Hammarskjold

by 10 Comments

My first review of CBR12 was Of Mice and Men, and I noted in the review that it was one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It feels like that book set the tone for 2020. By mid-March, reading for fun was … difficult. All the worries and fears surrounding COVID encroached on everything I read. Now that we have made it to the end of the year and there is a light at the end of the tunnel — a change […]

The setting is otherworldly but the trauma is not

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

by Leave a Comment

This is my third Nalo Hopkinson novel, and while I think Brown Girl in the Ring and Sister Mine are better works, I nevertheless liked this one quite a lot. Hopkinson has a unique talent for blending fantasy, science fiction, and Afro-Caribbean culture/history into stories of female empowerment. Midnight Robber’s main character is a girl who suffers trauma at the hands of someone she ought to have been able to trust and who then must find the path to her own healing. Midnight Robber is […]

The characters have as much personality and development as chess pieces

The Queen’s Gambit: A Novel by Walter Tevis

by Leave a Comment

Author Walter Tevis had a knack for writing stories that seem to adapt well to the screen. The Queen’s Gambit, written in 1983, is a current hit series on Netflix, but Tevis, who died in 1984, also penned The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler, and The Color of Money. I have not seen The Queen’s Gambit (or any of the other films) but I can say that the novel reads very much like a screenplay. He gives the reader action and tension on […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo