Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

And now there’s a ghost cat, as if a dead body wasn’t enough.

Something Whiskered (A Cat in the Stacks Mystery #17) by Miranda James

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Charlie Harris is a mid-fifties librarian in a small college in Athens, Mississippi, who shares his house with a cast of characters, and two cats; Ramses, an orange tabby, and Diesel, a 35 lb. Maine Coon the size of apparently a Beagle (why this cat is not in the Guinness Book of Records, I don’t know). Charlie, being a proper Southern Gentleman, and a nosy coot who believes he can do a better job than the police, decides he needs to get involved in every […]

FaeFae

Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning

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Read as part of CBR17 bingo: diaspora. The story follows a woman born-and-raised in Georgia who goes to Ireland for the duration of the book to investigate her sister’s death. It also has a plot of an alien race who is living on earth in diaspora.  I’ve been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I found this one on a subreddit recommending books like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Make no mistake, the author has definitely seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer more than once. She may even owe […]

Putting the Ire in Ireland

The Drowned by John Banville

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Autumn is beginning to make its entry in rural Ireland. An expensive car stands in the middle of a field. An oddly-dressed man runs up, tells a passer-by and the inhabitants of a nearby house that his wife has left the car after a tiff and has jumped off a cliff, drowning herself into the chilly Irish sea. But something is off, and the man’s behaviour is suspicious. Days pass, and the woman is not found. It is unclear if she has ever even existed. […]

A Little Past Its Due Date

The Snapper (Barrytown #2) by Roddy Doyle

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In early nineties small-town Ireland, the Rabbitte family is met with an unwelcome surprise: daughter Sharon, aged 20, is pregnant. She will not reveal who the father is, much to the consternation of her friends and family. We see their ups and downs as Sharon’s pregnancy progresses.  Whoever buys English language books for my local library has struck again: for some reason it carries book 2, but not book 1 or 3, of the Barrytown Trilogy, and because I am an idiot and did not […]

I’m More Myself with You than Anyone Else

Morbidly Yours by Ivy Fairbanks

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I had a great time with this. FMC Lark Thompson moves to Ireland to escape the memories of her deceased husband and the way that his death affected other parts of her life in Texas. She thinks she’s moving next door to a bed ‘n breakfast because it’s called Willow Haven, but it turns out to be a funeral home run by MMC Callum Flannelly. The two characters meet when a box of body bags is mis-delivered to Lark. I’m not a “kick my feet […]

“My son, I loved my native land with energy and pride ‘Til a blight came over all my crops and my sheep and cattle died”

Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine by Padraic X. Scanlan

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In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by the pathogen phytophthora infestans. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and causing millions more to emigrate. It was not until 2020 that the population of Ireland hit pre-Famine levels again. Padraic X. Scanlan covers how Ireland got to the point of the majority of its inhabitants being solely dependent on the potato crop […]



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