Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“As far from God, as heaven is wide”

The Language of Bees (2009) by Laurie R. King

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CBR Bingo square: Minds: Sherlock Holmes and his wife Mary Russell are solving the mystery of Sherlock’s missing daughter-in-law and granddaughter; minds are vulnerable to influence by the predatory; Damian Adler is a surrealist artist who rejects reason in his paintings. I was given The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994), the first in Laurie R. King’s ‘Russell and Holmes’ (yes, that Holmes) series for my birthday last year, and read it in the weeks following my surgery in May. It was a hot and arid few weeks, […]

Maiden, Friend, Wife, Counselor, and Queen

Esther by Norah Lofts

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CBR 14 Bingo: Snake There are several snakes in the grass who lie in wait for the king, most of all his favorite Haman. Esther is Jewish, but her husband the king of Persia doesn’t know it. Which is rather a problem, as he has allowed his courtier Haman to order the massacre of all the Jews in his empire. Did I really need to give a summary? It’s in the Bible! This was a short, swift read, starting with the casting out of the […]

So many monsters!

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch: A Novel by Rivka Galchen

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Cbr14bingo Monster The cover and the title of this book got my attention, and then I read the blurb. Did you know that in 1618 Johannes Kepler’s mother was accused of being a witch? (Read more here, here and here). Yes, that Johannes Kepler, the mathematician and astronomer whose works were integral to the Scientific Revolution! Author Rivka Galchen, a medical doctor by training, took this fascinating piece of information and imagined the events surrounding Katharina Kepler’s denunciation and trial. The novel is told from […]

Are you shining just for me?

City of Girls (2019) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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CBR14 Bingo square: Scandal! Vivian Morris is involved in a scandal that scandalises her suburban upper middle-class family; the theatre is generally considered to be a disreputable environment by the polite society that relishes it. Whether or not you like City of Girls will depend on whether or not you like Vivian Morris, narrator and heroine, who is a white rich suburban girl (daddy owns a mine, mother is obsessed with horses) kicked out of Vassar in 1940 and sent to live with her theatrical […]

I think George RR Martin read this before writing A Game of Thrones.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

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Ken Follett left his journalism career after three years of boredom to work for a small, London-based book publisher in the late-1970s. He began writing fiction as a hobby, and became proficient enough to end up earning money at it. With the publication of The Eye of the Needle in 1978, Follett entered the international stage and super stardom, selling 10 million copies. For the next several years, he wrote several best sellers and seemed set on a path to writing airport novels. Everything changed […]

“My ladies had changed nothing but the reasons for their pretense. If I had learned anything from them, it was this: only a fool lives in water and remains an enemy of the crocodile.”

The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi

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Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Shadow Y’all. I finished this book May 17th for my library book club, and I am just now (finally) reviewing it. What. A. Journey. Big props to CBR Bingo for being the catalyst for me getting me out of this backlog and writing slump… The titular Henna Artist (Lakshmi) is a shadow in that she disappeared from her village and has been building a name for herself in the upper social circles of Jaipur as a henna artist. Her past catches […]



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