Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I never stopped trying to save you, so don’t you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.”

A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1) by Alix E. Harrow

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A Spindle Splintered is a queer retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, playing on the variations that exist and adding one of its own. The basic story has been around for almost seven hundred years and has flown through the hands of Basile, Perrault, and Grimm, and that’s before we get into the hundreds of adaptations so what’s another? Harrow brings her own lens to this, and imbues her lead, Zinnia Grey, with a wonderfully clear voice. It is so realistic that I initially thought […]

“There are two people inside me and they are at war with each other.”

Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Brian FitzGibbon (Translator)

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This is a book that you have to give yourself over to, you have to meet it where it is and accept its way of imparting the story, of whether there is a story at all, and how the author has built her main character, and how that main character chooses to share her world with you. Once you’ve done that the book embraces you like waves coming onshore. But is it the cold waters of the North Atlantic or something warmer? I have my […]

“On that long journey she wept all the tears stored in her soul, leaving none in reserve for later sorrows.”

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, Margaret Sayers Peden (translator)

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It has been a few years since I last tackled an Allende work, but with tasks in both the Read Harder and Reading Women challenges about translated works (the former asking for non-European novel in translation, the latter asking specifically for a book by a South American author in translation) I had the perfect excuse to move Eva Luna up my to read list. The amount of emotion, detail, and characterization that Allende weaves into her writing is simply astounding. It always takes me a […]

“Our humanity is worth a little discomfort, it’s actually worth a lot of discomfort.”

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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I wish I felt better so I could really give So You Want to Talk About Race what it deserves, review-wise. The short review is if you haven’t already read this, you need to. Maybe you are like me and put it on your TBR right after its publication in 2018 and then it fell slowly down the list. Maybe you saw it on all of the recommended reading lists that proliferated in summer 2020 (A Reading List on Race for Allies, Antiracist Reading, Understanding […]

“The thing to keep in mind is that laws are framed by those who happen to be in power and for the purpose of keeping them in power.”

Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

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Like many, my formal education didn’t contain much indigenous history, and certainly almost none about modern indigenous history. Reading Women task 8 was read a memoir by an Indigenous, First Nations, Native, or Aboriginal Woman which helped move Lakota Woman up my TBR (I had added it in 2015 for a similar Read Harder task but I read Rabbit-Proof Fence instead). It certainly didn’t hurt that it was also the Indigenous Reading Circle’s choice for November (the group that inspired the Reading Women task). Lakota […]

“Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes,”

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Purple Hibiscus is a coming-of-age story and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s debut novel. It is the story of fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja who lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. In some ways they are completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, it is revealed rather quickly that things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating. As the country begins […]



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