Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“For I was indeed a student of human nature, as every orphan and hooker and unwanted kid must be.”

Vera by Carol Edgarian

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CBR 17 Bingo: Family – Central to Vera’s story is a desire for a family in which she can truly belong, and her outside status with both her birth mother and her foster family. Vera has always lived under the shadow of a great secret – though raised as the younger daughter in a Swedish household, she is actually the daughter of San Francisco’s greatest madams. In the aftermath of the great earthquake of 1906, these worlds come tumbling together. I remember it was a […]

Kin in Far-flung Places

A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao

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CBR17 Bingo: Diaspora – This story is intimately bound up in the experience of the Indian diaspora in colonial Fiji, who went to work there as indentured servants but were in reality little more than slaves. Caught between demotion and disgrace, Indian police officer Akal Singh is instead posted to colonial Fiji, where an investigation into the vanishing of an indentured Indian woman from a sugarcane plantation is complicated by the political pressures within the British Empire. I’m a sucker for an unusual setting in […]

When in Doubt, Lie Your Tongue Off

Dangerous Obsession by Natasha Peters

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Rhawnie was born in a Romani encampment in Russia, but a murder and an encounter with a man she is fated to follow to the ends of the earth launch her on a path that will see her go halfway across the globe. It took me way too long to realize that Rhawnie is a corruption of the Indian name Rani, which means ‘queen’. This is a nice and long and adventurous bodice ripper of the kind I like perfectly. What sets it apart from […]

“For even to listen to the story of the Trưng Sisters is, in these troubled times, a dangerous act.”

Bronze Drum by Phong Nguyen

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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 […]

Grossly Misdirected Rage

Beloved Enemy by Amanda York

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Lanna, an English gentlewoman, falls in love with one young American but finds herself coerced into marriage with his dark-tempered friend, who seems intent on punishing her for reasons she does not understand. Look at that cover. Take a moment to appreciate that cover. I really miss old bodice-ripper style romance covers. Anyway, young, sheltered Lanna falls squarely in the trap of a dastardly devil with mommy issues who’s trying to get revenge on her father through her, except it turns out that Lanna is […]

The Thin Line Between Fantasy and Reality

Mary and the Birth of Frankstein by Anne Eekhout

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The year is 1812, and fourteen-year-old Mary Goodwin is living in pastoral Dundee, where she may find love but may find danger as well. The year is 1816, and eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley is living in rainy Geneva, where she may conceive of something that is strange and fearful and all hers, if she will allow herself to do it. I have still not read Frankenstein. (I keep meaning to! There’s just so many books to read!) But I am familiar with its plot, and the […]



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