Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens
Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: workplace. The vast majority of the book takes place at the Buffalo Queen saloon. I love reading. And I’m a voracious reader, as my Cannonball Read review catalog can attest to. Maybe I don’t get to it as much as I have in years past but I enjoy reading and documenting what I’ve read. However, because I devour so many books, I tend to have either read or tried most of the stuff I see on listicles. It’s to […]
The Puzzle Wood by Rosie Andrews
(Hello Team, I am posting a review in June! This is months earlier than I usually do!) I picked this book up on vacation in Edinburgh. The cover has crows on it and it looked good enough. Spoiler – there are no crows in the book at all. Weak sauce. I do not read much mystery at all. The pitch of “governess goes to isolated mansion in woods and things are spoooooooky” seemed like a diverting way to spend much of the flight home. […]
Bronze Drum by Phong Nguyen
The Trưng sisters, Trắc and Nhi, are as different than each other than sisters can be, but they are united in one thing – their outrage at the treatment of the Viet by the colonizing Han Chinese. When their outrages grow too heavy to bear, they raise an army of women to fight back. It occurred to me while I was reading this book that not only do I know very little about Vietnam past the eponymous war (and even that mostly through the eyes […]
This diversion we will discuss books about real people: biographies, memoirs, and historical fiction. I read about people mostly through historical fiction. I adore all the books written by Fiona Davis, Lynda Cohen Loigman, and Kate Quinn. After I proclaim for the umpteenth time, I am so done with WWII, I stumble upon a masterpiece like Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray. I will gobble up the occasional juicy memoir or biography. Who could resist Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris (which must be […]
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything. ― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Ever feel like running away from your life and forming an everlasting pact with a hot demon you meet in the woods on the day of your wedding? Addie didn’t feel like it either but that’s what happened. It’s 1729 in rural France. Addie is twenty-three, single, a dreamer, an artist, and has zero interest in succumbing to the […]
The Song of Achilles (2011) by Madeline Miller
Spoiler alerts for a Bronze Age epic poem, I guess, also content note for discussion of sex in this review. I liked this but I didn’t love it. Homer’s Iliad is about blood and fire and gods and fate, about a war that made heroes and villains into legends that echoed through the ages (and sometimes switched their positions). The Song of Achilles is about one of these heroes, the titular Achilles, he of the heel, and his lover Patroclus, and it’s…sweet? And (rather surprisingly) […]
