Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Ale

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I'm TAing in creative writing, and I'm in the midst of editing my first novel. Along with CBR, I have book reviews published with "The Literary Review," short essay with "Fiction Southeast" and a forthcoming publication with "The Book Smuggler's Den." CBR has definitely helped my writing skills since now I know what readers are looking for for in their works. So, thank you, CBR! Hopefully someday, we'll be able to review my novel on this blog. :) (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Ale's Quick Questions interview.)

Ale's Reviews:

The Heroines We Wanted in Childhood

Cheshire Crossing by Andy Weir & Sarah Anderson

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I’m not usually into graphic novels, but my friend showed up to our weekly DnD game with “Cheshire Crossing,” and was like, ‘you have to read this!’ Being that it was free (hello, #no money bingo square), I did, and was not disappointed. Now, I still haven’t read the Martin, so I didn’t realize who Andy Weir was, but I love Sarah Anderson’s art, and from the start, the cover and all the comics of this graphic novel are gorgeous. Weir’s writer’s note on the first […]

Tricked Into a YA Romance

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Lainie Taylor

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In trying to find an agent for my own novel, I asked my friends to suggest some of their favorite books that closely resembled my fantasy so that I could shamelessly query the agents of those books for my own devices. Faintingviolet lent me Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I had no idea going into this book what it was since I’d never heard of Lainie Taylor before. But faintingviolet knows I’m not a huge fan of YA, and I pretty much avoid romance at any […]

The Greatest Library that Never Was

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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I was a huge fan of the Night Circus, so I was ecstatic when the lovely faintingviolet shared her copy of the Starless Sea with me. To give too much of the plot away takes all the joy out of reading this story, but the baseline is that there’s a magical library hidden underground accessible by doorways above. The nature through which patrons find these doors varies to fate, and in recent years, someone’s been closing all the doors. At least until a grad student named Zachery stumbles […]

One Ring To Rule Them All…..

The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien

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My first encounter with the enormous doorstop that is Tolkien’s classic was when I was ten and my dad read it to me as a bedtime story. I blame him, and these books for my obsession with fantasy and the ridiculous amount of Pinterest boards I’ve dedicated to LOTR and Hobbit fan art.  Even so, sitting down to re-read the doorstop is a commitment I’m not usually ready to make, so for a long time, the movies have kept my obsessions alive. But pandemic lock […]

Was It Really Friendship?

Mrs. Lincoln & Mrs. Keckley: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave by Jennifer Fleischner

Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave & Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley

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  While noodling on the internet one day, I came across an article about Mary Lincoln’s personal dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. A former slave from Maryland who’d bought her own freedom, Keckley was a master mantua-maker who got herself the coveted position of dressmaker to the president’s wife. There was a little link at the bottom of the article about Keckley’s memoir, and it was too enticing to pass up. Happily, even though it was published in 1868, my library had a copy of it! The […]

Teetering on the Edge of Fantastic

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

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While buying a copy of Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble, Amazon alerted me that I “might also like” Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I’ve never read Swamplandia (although I’m totally going to now), and I knew nothing of Russell and her work, but the title sounded awesome and I’m always looking for quality speculative short fiction. I was not disappointed. Russell’s fabulous and her collection is as varied and weird and wonderful as the title suggests. Her work runs the gambit from vampires subsisting on lemons in […]



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