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:

Quiet but Devestating

Academy Street by Mary Costello

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Academy Street is deceivingly short, clocking in at 145 pages. Mary Costello fits an entire lifetime into this space, and while my original thought was that there was no possible way to fit a lifetime in such a short space properly, with all the deep meaning and detail, I was so very, very wrong. Tess Lohan is the quiet character, and in many books she’d be the one-lined, barely named side character. Her life is nothing short of ordinary, at least as far as story plotting […]

The Country of Money

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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The lovely crystalclear was sharing her spoils from bookcon, and the pre-sale copy of Emily St. John Mandel’s newest novel was in her pile. I nabbed it, excited for Mandel after loving Station 11, and also looking forward to a literary shift after my Rowell YA obsession. In Mandel’s usual style of telling stories from multiple viewpoints in moving times and places, The Glass Hotel spans New York City and rural Canada, the early 2000s to the Great Recession, and through the present day, with our […]

Last Bingo, # 8: More Rowell

Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell

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I blame faintingviolet (and crystalclear) for my new obsession with everything Rowell. I was so happily ignorant before cracking one of her books, but now I’m like an addict and I can’t get enough. I haven’t suffered from book-hangover in a very long time, but Wayward Son has me moping around wondering when book 3 is going to hit the shelves. I don’t know what to read next, I have a stack from the library that I’m sending back because everything is just paling in comparison […]

3 Heads are Definitely Better Than 2

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

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Please enjoy our joint effort in unpacking the amazing Carry On! Ale: I very much enjoy that Rainbow Rowell did the most meta thing ever and basically wrote a fan-fic about her own characters that were characters in a fan-fic created by her own characters. I’m still wrapping my own brain around that sentence. But I think it’s a testament to her craft that she had characters that were so nuanced from Fangirl that she could expand them into another two books (note from faintingviolet – […]

Good Language is Wasted on the Young: Bingo 6 (because I missed one)

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

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I read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for the first time in 5th grade for a class assignment, and never revisited it again. However, my interest in the original tale was piqued when hubby and I took a trip to actual Sleepy Hollow, New York, for their Halloween festivities a few weeks ago. We saw a storyteller do the entire legend complete with props, costumes, and the original language. It was AWESOME, but I wondered while we were listening how much of the story was truncated […]



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