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:

Just Short of Amazing

Pump Six & Other Stories by Paolo Bagigalupi

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How have I not heard of Paolo Bagigalupi until right now? A colleague of mine recommended “Pop Squad,” and it was life changing. I had to go out and find the whole collection. Bagigalupi’s writing is an amazing mix of darkly twisted but heartfelt prose. His short story collection, Pump Six & Other Stories, covers eleven forays into his speculative imagination. My favorites were “The Fluted Girl,” “Pop Squad,” and “Pump Six,” but all the stories in the collection share a new look on post […]

Step By Step

Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess by Rachel Hoffman

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Several lovely people on this site have reviewed “Unf*ck Your Habitat” with rave reviews, and I’m totally a sucker for a fun title and I hate cleaning, so I decided to give this book a go. And it’s every bit as good as everyone says. Hoffman breaks cleaning down into short bursts of what she refers to as 20/10s or 20 minutes of doing something and 10 minutes of rest. That way something is always getting done, but it never feels overwhelming. It starts to […]

Did We Really Need that Character?

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

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I picked this up on a whim at a used book shop. The cover was nice and the first page was really intriguing. I got into it right away, and the story starts out with an incredibly compelling narrator, Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee escaping to England for asylum after a terrible event occurs in her village. As the story unfolds, however, the plot goes crazy-pants and we’re introduced to a second narrator, Sarah, a British magazine editor who met Little Bee through terrible circumstances […]

Serial Bad Writing

The Killer Book of Serial Killers by Tom Philbin and Michael Philbin

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For a research library, my university’s stacks are pretty lacking in texts that are actually helpful to most students’ work, so I often help out my students by taking out books from my own library system. This is how I ended up with The Killer Book of Serial Killers. I would never have selected this myself based on the cover alone, but my student found it and was intrigued, and who am I to judge the sources he wants to use for his Criminology final? We […]

Fresh Fantasy

How Long Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

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It took me a long time to get through this book, but not because I didn’t like it. I really loved many of the stories in this collection. Jemisin’s prose is tight, and fresh, and wonderful. She creates full-bodied characters in small spaces, and in many ways, the largest reason it took me almost a whole month to read was because I’d be so bereft at having to leave a  character or environment that I love, and I simply wasn’t ready to move on to […]

Drug Trip or Wacky Plot….Who Can Say?

Remedia: A Picaresque by Micahel Joyce

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I was asked to read this book for a lit mag and do a review of it. The last several books I’ve done for them have been pretty awesome, so I was optimistic going into this one. It’s a picaresque style novel, which I’ve never encountered before, and I had high hopes that I would enjoy this new type of genre. But, alas, I’ve DNFed this one at page 256 because I just can’t anymore with the crazitude. Remedia starts out like it’s going to […]



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