Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A love story set in the Arctic surrounded by terrible men ruining things

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

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It is 1617 and nearly all the men of the northeasternmost city of Vardo, Norway have been tragically killed by a storm while fishing out at sea. That leaves the women and children of Vardo to fend for themselves. Maren is among those women. Maren must find a way to balance the headstrong Kirsten who feels that no tradition is too sacred to be broken in service of herself, the pious Toril who passes judgment on anyone who does not fall in line with her […]

Do Every Stupid Thing that Makes You Feel Alive

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The Kristin Lavransdatter books tell the story of the life of Kristin Lavransdatter, a Norwegian woman living in the 14th century. I read historical fiction only very rarely, and a series about a Norwegian housewife in the Middle Ages wouldn’t normally be something that would be very high on my TBR list. I chose these because at some point in the last year, I was reading an article which had a short quote from one of the books. I can’t remember the quote or the […]

Maybe you’re trying to distract yourself.

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You know when you have a long stretch of five star reviews and you start to wonder, are my standards super low? Does everything delight me? Am I some kind of a hack reader that just loves everything that passes in front of my eyes? Well, if you have these concerns, may I highly recommend The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter to you. It will alleviate all of those suspicions, because it’s seriously the worst, and no one could possibly like it. How on earth […]

Norway can keep its lutefisk, but I’ll happily take any mystery novels it wants to hand over

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This was my first foray into Norwegian fiction and didn’t know what to expect. This mystery was a complete sucker punch and I loved it. Apparently Karin Fossum is called the Norwegian queen of crime. I didn’t know that until after I finished Eva’s Eye, but I can definitely see why she has the nickname. Her plot kept me guessing right up until the end and then left me shocked and disconcerted. Eva and her daughter, Emma, spot a dead body floating in the river […]

It’s like Game of Thrones but without all the violence, and scheming, and a lot more Jesus

Kristin Lavransdatter I: The Wreath by Sigrid Undset

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I kid in the headline, but this really does involve a large introspective journey into the natures of Sin and Faith.   Sigrid Undset won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, in large part because of this trilogy of novels. These novels trace the personal history of Kristin Lavransdatter, a medieval Norwegian noblewoman from her birth through….well, I will have to see when I read the third novel. This first section primarily deals with her childhood, her adolescence, and her various courtships, love affairs, […]

Someone pay me to travel around Europe eating tasty food and kissing cute boys.

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Lucy Knisley is a delightful, talented human being, and I will read every book she chooses to publish. This particular book is a record of her travels to Europe over the summer of 2011. She was invited to speak at a Norwegian comics convention in Bergen, and used the opportunity to travel to Sweden to visit a man she’d met several weeks before when he was vacationing in New York City. She also travels to France (Paris, and another city of which I’ve since forgotten […]



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