Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Better than most

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

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3.5 stars. At this point, my expectations for Jane Austen retellings are so very very low. There are about 2 that I can think of that I would recommend to anyone and considering I’ve read plenty? That’s not a great batting average. It’s like authors/publishers know fans will pick them up so they don’t feel like they have to try very hard. People LOVE Lizzie & Darcy so of course they’ll read. But in truth, you’re getting compared to one of the best writers of […]

CBR Bingo (8 and 9) This Old Thing

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If “This Old Thing” hadn’t been a square on Bingo this year I could have easily gone my whole life without reading any Jane Austen, and I still haven’t seen any of her film adaptions. I read a lot of classic American literature in high school and college, including Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, several Steinbeck novels, The Scarlet Letter and even Moby Dick but I don’t think I was ever assigned anything from the other side of the pond while a student. I picked Pride and Prejudice because it seemed […]

“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up.”

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I like that Ibi Zoboi didn’t call this a “retelling” of Pride and Prejudice. She’s going with the term “remix.” That seems to fit a little better, because while the main plot is pretty similar, there are lots of little things that don’t quite fit into a strict retelling. What Zoboi did instead was take a story that most of us already know, flip parts of it around, and make it her own. And it really worked for me. Zuri Benitez was born and raised […]

Every book is a different hood, a different country, a different world.

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Ibi Zoboi’s Pride is a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Brooklyn. The best adaptations take a familiar story and use it to explore contemporary issues. Once we identify each new character with it’s P&P counterpart, we understand where they fit in the story and then we can move on to the meat of it. We know class is going to be a part of the conflict, and since this is a modernization, we know getting the 5 Benitez sisters married off isn’t a motivation. 

Laundry Day is Seriously the Worst

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Bingo Square: Backlog This is far from the book that has been in my to read pile longest when all my books are taken into consideration but purely from a Kindle/e-book perspective, it’s definitely towards the bottom of my library. Since I am so late to the game, I doubt there is much I can add to the discussion at this point.  The novel is yet another spin on Pride and Prejudice, but instead of telling the story of Elizabeth and Darcy with a new […]

Thar be dragons

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[Sidenote: This book is only $1.99 right now!] I always love it when a fun book falls on a cannonball milestone. Although, I have been having a pretty good reading year in terms of quality, so maybe not too surprising. I heard of this book when it first came out in 2017 and I was fairly sure I was going to love it, so I was saving it as a comfort read during a bad week. I should really do that more often because it […]



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