Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Medieval Mean Girls

Matrix by Lauren Groff

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I both do and do not understand how Matrix could possibly have made it onto “Best Books” lists for 2021. I hated the narrative style of first person present combined with free indirect discourse with a touch of narrative omniscience. I do not enjoy first person present narration in the first place and the ambiguity and unbalance between knowing what Marie thinks and feels, but also displaying knowledge of things Marie does not know (or at least not yet) just did not work for me. […]

Melania Trump Fanfiction

Our American Friend by Anna Pitoniak

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(“I felt helpless,” she said. “Here it is, I thought. This is what the bargain comes down to. This is your destiny, Lara. You will be a part of this, this tragedy. And there is nothing you can do about it. Because you chose this.”) Sofie, a former White House correspondent, is astonished to be chosen to be the biographer of the mysterious First Lady Lara Caine. As Lara tells her story, Sofie comes to realize that the secrets she’s spilling out could be ruinous […]

Standing on One Two Fifth

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead writing a crime novel is exactly what it sounds so depending on how you feel about him as a writer will impact how you feel about this book. I realize that’s a pedantic thing to say because that’s true of almost every writer. But I emphasize it here because I’ve usually never been able to be in sync with Whitehead’s style. I couldn’t finish Underground Railroad and while I liked parts of Zone One and the concept as a whole, he kept losing me with tangents. Still, […]

How Cannonball Read has given me permission to not finish a book

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

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I love how supportive the Cannonball community is with the constant reassurance one doesn’t have to review everything read and that it’s okay to not finish a book.  Historically, I have been a finisher of books.  Then I started reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James for Cannonball Bingo 2020. Thirty-six pages in I quit because I could not handle the near constant parade of sex, bodily fluids, violence, and disparaging remarks about boys who are actually girls and vice versa.  That was an […]

“My heart is a hand reaching”

Devotion by Hannah Kent

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Devotion is a gloriously beautiful, heartbreaking story of impossible, indestructible love. Hanne is a girl becoming a woman in a community of Lutheran extremists in 19th century Prussia.  She has never doubted her family’s faith, but feels a deep spiritual and synaesthetic connection to the natural world, hearing an underlying hum of music. “Baptise me in rainfall and crown me in sunrise.” “I could hear the sunshine ringing like a blow to the ear.” Hanne’s oddness is a barrier to friendship with the other girls of […]

A quiet book with a powerful story of connection and survival

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

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This was the second book that the marvelous and generous faintingviolet got for me last year during the Holiday Book Exchange. This book is outside of what I usually pick up to read, but I’m thankful that I gave it a chance. Agnes Magnusdottir has been convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the early 1800s of Iceland. While she awaits her execution she is sent to live with a district official and his family. There’s his wife Margret, a very sick woman who […]



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