Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An appalling, vital read

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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CBR 17 BINGO: Citizen. While Mennonite women theoretically have the same citizenship rights as anyone else in their country, this isn’t the reality for the women of Molotschna. Women Talking, adapted for film in 2022, is a fictionalized response to very real and appalling incidents that occurred in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009. During that period, more than 100 women in a remote Mennonite colony woke up to signs that they had been raped during the night. Their claims were dismissed by the colony elders: […]

Mennonite #MeToo

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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Women Talking is a fictionalized story that is founded on a real story- the ‘ghost rapes’ that occurred in the Manitoba Mennonite colony in rural Bolivia between 2004 and 2009.  For years, women would awake groggy, with signs that they had been sexually assaulted.  Eventually one of the rapists is caught in the act; he confesses his role in the rapes and implicates 8 other men from the colony. Toews, who is from a Mennonite community in Canada, took this horrific story and turned it […]

I don’t recommend reading them together

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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Sometimes when I’m reading a book that is particularly tough, I’ll give my brain a break by switching to a different book every couple of chapters. This strategy quickly falls apart when one book is Just Mercy and the other is Women Talking, they kind of just egg each other on in the downward emotional spiral. Just Mercy is Bryan Stevenson’s memoir of the years he has spent as a pro bono death row lawyer in Alabama where they rival Texas in their enthusiasm for state-sponsored murder. I’m […]

A Difficult Read With Some Hope

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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I ended up pre-ordering this novel based on llp’s review of this last year.  It was published in Canada long before the Kindle version was available in the United States because I didn’t even remember what this was about by the time it downloaded onto my reader. Toews wrote this novel as a fictional reaction to the horrifying events that happened in a Mennonite community in Bolivia.  I had actually read about the rapes that had plagued the women of the community before llp’s review.  […]

Women talking, getting comfortable with anger

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I picked up Miriam Toews’ newest novel, Women Talking, in the airport recently. I felt very lucky because it ticked so many boxes for me – I had run out of reading material on a work trip so really needed a book, it was in those new resell displays at the news stand so it was discounted enough to get through my NO NEW BOOK PURCHASES embargo, it fits with my vow to read more Canadian literature, and it was published in 2018. Toews has […]

Spooky and beautiful and unprotected from the raw bloodiness of the world

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Yolandi and Elfrieda are sisters raised in an isolated, stifling, patriarchal community of Russian Mennonite immigrants in rural Canada. Their parents buy Elf a forbidden piano to give her an outlet, and she pours everything into her music, leaving home at 17 to study in Oslo, eventually becoming a world-renowned concert pianist. But her life is weighed down by the crippling pain of depression, and she ends up in the hospital after yet another suicide attempt.  In All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, everyone […]



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