I have never liked time travel. Episodes of science fiction TV that deal with it tend to give me a headache because I can’t wrap my mind around it and start thinking in circles. But I loved this book. It’s been around for a while and also had a movie based on it, but for those who don’t know, it’s about Henry and Clare. Henry is an involuntary time traveler; he has no control over where or when he travels, although it typically seems to […]
A Pair of Novels About Equestrians
The main character for both novels is Annemarie Zimmer. In Riding Lessons, she starts out as an 18-year-old equestrian who is an Olympic contender. Then she and her horse are in a horrific accident during a jumping event. It kills her horse and comes very close to paralyzing Annemarie. This all happens at the beginning of the book, and then it jumps forward 20 years. Annemarie has just lost her job, her husband has left her, she has a very difficult relationship with her teenage daughter, […]
Memoir about Trauma, Shame, Food, and Body
When she was 12 years old, Roxane Gay was gang-raped by a group of boys from school, one of whom was a boy she had sort of been dating and loved. After that, she set out to eat and eat until her body was a “fortress” that could protect her and couldn’t be hurt. This was interesting for me to read because of the multiple lenses through which I was viewing it. There was the psychologist part of me who had a sort of detached […]
Novel Within a Novel
Since I started Cannonball Read, I’ve tended to think, to varying degrees, about what I might write in a review as I’ve read each book. I didn’t do that much with this one, which I think is a testament to how engrossing it was. The main narrative frame is from the perspective of Iris Griffen (née Chase), a widowed woman in her 80s who has a heart condition and is trying to document her life before she dies: “It’s a slow race now, between me […]