Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A haunting story on many levels

Anita de Monte Laughs Last: A Novel by Xochitl Gonzalez

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I read this novel as an e-book purchased through Bookshop.org. If you, like me, have been relying on Kindle e-books for a while and want to stop supporting that dickhead Bezos, check out Bookshop. They have a selection of e-books that is somewhat limited but they are very good offerings nonetheless. Moreover, when you make a purchase, Bookshop will donate a percentage of the sale to the independent bookstore of your choice. Buying books has never felt more virtuous! Anita de Monte Laughs Last is, […]

Let’s Try This Again

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

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When I was in high school, being a “college track” kid, we had a choice of only one fine arts elective.  For me, it would always be music, never art.  And when I got to college, art was the one elective I could never take, because the textbooks were just so damn expensive.  So even though, I love a good museum, and am willing to examine just about anything that hangs on the walls (looking at you Frank Stella with your solid black canvas – […]

Anita de Monte Laughs Last: shedding light on a forgotten artist

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

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mood music: Fantasmas – humbe I have complicated feelings about this book, and so I will preface by saying that I am rating it 3.75/5, rounding up on here. The beginning was a little slow, but it picked up for me about a fifth of the way through, and I couldn’t put it down after that. Gonzalez is a talented writer, able to craft fully formed, vibrant characters with narration bouncing off the page. If you like one of her characters, you really like them. […]

A Middle-aged Coming of Age

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

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Olga Acevedo and her brother, Prieto, are sort of minor celebrities in NYC – Prieto is a congressman representing the neighborhood where they grew up in Brooklyn, and Olga is an event planner with many wealthy clients (including Russian mobsters). On the face of it, they are both successful adults in their 40s, but Olga and Prieto have struggled with trauma from their childhood and neither has fully accepted themselves. Their parents felt something more than pride in their Puerto Rican heritage – they were […]

“You must remember, mijo, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors.”

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

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Olga Dies Dreaming is a debut novel, getting a ton of buzz in library circles. Set in 2017 Brooklyn, our main characters are Olga, a wedding planner to the very rich, and her brother, Prieto, who represents their largely Puerto Rican (but gentrifying) neighborhood in Congress. But hovering over every page is their mother, Blanca. Blanca was a radical in the Young Lords, who abandoned her school-aged children to be a militant activist all over Central and South America. This abandonment fundamentally shaped both Olga […]



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