Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The way these characters can understand what isn’t being said, while being delightfully snarky is just the best.

And They Lived Happily Ever After by Therese Beharrie

by 1 Comment

Representation on the page matters, and while finding representation that feels exactly like you can be some of the most affirming experiences out there, finding representation that speaks to a component of your life that isn’t exactly how you experience it is also incredibly important. Beharrie includes in her acknowledgements that a lot of what we see on the page in And They Lived Happily Ever After draws from her own experiences with Anxiety, and as usual, when an author so very obviously writes from […]

A great man, a great book (??), but not a book for me.

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela

by Leave a Comment

Oh, this rating makes me feel bad. Three stars means ‘I liked it!’ I just don’t think autobiographies are for me. Nelson Mandela was a great man, and I’m glad I know more about him, but this was not super engaging for me, even in audiobook. The audiobook, by the way, is a good one. The narrator, Michael Boatman, is from South Africa, so he can do all the clicks and glottal stops that Mandela’s native tongue of Xhosa requires. His voice is soothing and […]

The Horrors of Replacement Theory Conspiracists

Weeping Waters by Karin Brynard

by Leave a Comment

Some have pegged Karin Brynard as the “South African Stieg Larsson.” For good and not so good reasons, I can see why. I’m not an expert on South Africa. I know the broad strokes of the fall of apartheid and how it functioned before the rise of President Mandela, but as far as how the country is adapting today, I’m mostly clueless. I have no doubt that a herrenvolk government doesn’t just switch to multicultural democracy overnight, and that South Africans are probably several generations […]

“The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again.”

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

by 2 Comments

“Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.” Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel that gets read in schools a lot, probably because it has a vaguely To Kill a Mockingbird-like feel, but international, with the action moved to South Africa. The Reverend Stephen Kumalo, a black Anglican priest who lives in a rural […]

We’ll Never be Perfect, But We Can Try to be Better

One Last Chance by Therese Beharrie

by Leave a Comment

I had to sit with this one for a while. I enjoy Therese Beharrie’s writing so much, but the structure of One Last Chance was a struggle for me at first. By the end of the book I was genuinely in love with it. One Last Chance is the final book in Beharrie’s One Day to Forever series about the Roux sisters. I have only read the last two books, and I think they are pretty stand alone. After a long illness, their father has […]

A surprisingly educational celebrity autobiography

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

by Leave a Comment

In this very engaging autobiography, Trevor Noah opens up about growing up in South Africa, born from a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father at a time when this was literally a crime punishable with several years in prison. The Apartheid regime ended while Noah was still young, but his childhood was still deeply affected by the fact that he was a mixed race child in a society where the races were not supposed to mix at all, to the point where his […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo