Hello Lovely Cannonballers, did you read A Wrinkle in Time? Did you comment on our Book Club post? Did you see the movie? (I didn’t read the book, did see the movie, and I have *thoughts*). Most importantly, are you ready for two more book clubs this year? As we celebrate our tenth anniversary we asked you to vote in two categories, a well-reviewed Cannonball book (10 or more reviews and an average Cannonballer rating higher than 4.6) and something that AlabamaPink read during the first Cannonball […]
Save humanity and destroy humans
Dawn is the first book in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, and like much of Butler’s work I’m going to go through them very slowly, both to savor them and let them filter through my head. Butler does not write easy science fiction, the contents of her novels challenge the reader and the ideas in them linger long after the last page is turned. Dawn starts with the awakening of Lilith Iyapo. Earth has just gone through a nuclear war and Lilith remembers the small, pitiful struggles […]
Never forget your humanity, or that of other people.
Kindred is a first-person narrative of a woman, Dana, and her husband, Kevin, being pulled back in time to save the life of her ancestor, Rufus, who seems perpetually prone to disaster. The catch is that she’s African American and Rufus is white, and lives in Antebellum Maryland. I loved this book so hard. The germ of this book occurred to Octavia Butler after she heard the anger of a young black consciousness activist targeting the subservience in older generations towards oppressive white culture. Paired […]
Just Read This Book Already
I literally read this book 6 months ago, but kept putting off writing the review because there’s no way anything I can say will do any justice to Kindred. Seriously, Octavia Butler is working on a completely different level than most authors. If I were a teacher, I’d be pushing this on my students like crazy. Dana, a black woman, and Kevin, a white man, are a married couple living in the 1970s. They’re both very modern, educated people. On Dana’s 26th birthday, she is […]