Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Life is a peculiar venture”

Amongst Women by John McGahern

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(Novel reviewed for the “Shadow” square of CBR Bingo.) “What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family working in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.” I’ve studied (and taught) a good bit of Irish poetry and drama, but I’ve come to feel that Irish fiction represented a nagging gap in my knowledge. So I decided that […]

A nightmare before a 1950s Irish Christmas

Snow by John Banville

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Content note: this review will discuss child sexual abuse, which is central to the plot of the novel as well as to the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland (which is also at the center of the novel). A lady has not been able to catch a damned break so far in 2022, so this is the first moment I’ve had to sit down and write a review, of the most recent book that I’ve finished, and goddamn was it a bleak and tough […]

“Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone can do anything.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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This was slower paced and less twisty-turny than her other books but I loved that about it. I liked her last book, The Witch Elm, but I loved this one. This is also a character study as well as a mystery/crime novel (that isn’t part of her Dublin Murder series), but here the protagonist is a former cop from Chicago who retired and decided to try and find peace in the Irish countryside. He bought a beaten down farmhouse and has spent a lot of […]



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