Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I have no interest in your orders, I have no interest in what was legal at the time”

The Huntress by Kate Quinn

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Bingo Square: History Schmistory Kate Quinn’s follow up to The Alice Network once again follows multiple timelines and perspectives, though the timelines are much closer together this time around and involve three people.  After a short prologue which includes the only part from the perspective of the titular huntress and a newspaper article introducing the war crimes the huntress committed during World War II, the novel alternates between the character views of Jordan, a teenage girl living in 1946 Boston.  Her widowed father, an antiquarian, […]

Living in the Past

This Storm by James Ellroy

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I met James Ellroy when purchasing this book at a book signing. I was nervous, having heard plenty of stories about his uncouth behavior in public. But he was actually quite nice and gracious with his time. It seems to me that once he rides out his initial wave of anxiety and gets comfortable in a situation, he’s fine. Both of us being Lutheran, we joked about the great Martin Luther; he of course appreciating Luther’s vulgarity towards the Pope. Ellroy makes it clear that […]

Put the Needle on it

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

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Like about half the people I know, I have a father with an inexplicable fondness for all things World War II. Particularly films like A Bridge Too Far (which is a total snoozefest), but documentaries, too. Because I’ve spent one too many nights having to watch Hitler’s Secret Love Nest on the Discovery Channel I tend to steer away from the subject, particularly the dry, yes-it-was-all-rather-horrid approach of the British which they employed at least up until the 1980s. I do, however, have a subscription […]

Based on the cover, you’d think this was about three friends. It’s really not, at all.

Lilac Girls: A Novel by Martha Hall Kelly

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This was not what I was expecting at all.  I bought it ages ago and it’s been sitting on my Kindle for over a year.  I started it when I was travelling, I did not have the wifi turned on and so did not get the book summary when you open a book for the first time.  All I knew was this was set in WWII and featured three women from different walks of life, whose lives intersected somehow.  Based on the cover, they appear […]

Their names written on water. Or scorched into the earth. Or atomized into the air. Legion.

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CBR10Bingo: This Is The End (BINGO!) Have you ever read a book that you hated to put down but also hated to keep reading because you couldn’t bear the thought of reaching the end? That’s how I felt reading Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, the companion to her brilliant Life After Life.  Unlike Ursula in Life After Life, her younger brother Teddy only gets one shot at life. He still becomes a bomber pilot during World War II, still gets shot down over Germany, […]

If you wonder what the Irish were doing in World War II this might answer it….

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This is the Award Winner. The Dorothy Canfield Fisher award is a Vermont state award that the books are picked by adults (though I am not always sure why they were the pickers as one was a professor at my college who had no English or child background that I knew of) and then voted on by the kids. Of course, the year I did this award the “cool kids” pick won. But that is the perfect lead in to this book. It is 1943. […]



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