Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Water Dancer – a brilliant novel

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Since I know Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing the Black Panther comic for a couple of years, and the blurb I read about this book was that it was about a young man with extraordinary abilities, I thought it would be a more action oriented style of novel. I could not have been more wrong. Yes, the main character, Hiram Walker, does possess an ability he calls conducting, but it is used very infrequently in the story as he really does not learn how to use […]

Home is something carried with us, in our blood, for better or worse

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I’m sorry you have suffered. I’m sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have.” I have friends who talk about memory like it is a living thing, ancestors like they have never died, […]

Future Required Reading

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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I love Coates writing style. When I read Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power, I wished that I could write like him, with his style and vocabulary. He says things the way I would want to say them. That is why I read The Water Dancer and nothing has changed. I still wish I could write like Coates but the thing I like best about him is that I know that I cannot because I have not and will […]

The year is 1781 and James Armistead Lafayette is a spy!

Choose Your Own Adventure Spies: James Armistead Lafayette by Kyandreia Jones

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The two main story points of this Choose Your Own Adventure Spies are radically different. One story arc has a supernatural aspect that clashes with the realistic one. And while there are amusing moments, Kyandreia Jones’s story is mostly serious. In CYOAS: James Armistead Lafayette, you are James Armistead, a literate slave of Virginia. During a fire (that may have been a diversion to help your friend John escape) where you are trying to save your fellow slaves, you are hit on the head by […]

Why do you build me up…just to let me down?

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

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George Washington “Wash” Black had spent all of his twelve years as a field slave on a plantation in Barbados when he and friend/protector Big Kit were suddenly summoned to the master’s house to serve at table. After the tense dinner at which the master quarreled with his brother Christopher and broke Big Kit’s nose with a plate, the main house slave tells Wash he’s to stay behind and tend Christopher in his room. Big Kit tries in vain to argue Wash’s way out of […]

I taught you better than to open doors you can’t close

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is yet another great example of the kind of book I would have missed had I not started reading more speculative fiction and diversifying the voices in my library. That would have been a pity, because this complex, powerful novel may very well end up at the top of my 2019 favorites list. After Earth suffered an unnamed cataclysm 300 years ago, the remnants of humanity were crowded onto the spaceship Matilda and launched toward some long-forgotten destination. Humanity […]



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