Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I'm a special education teacher by day and a reader by most other hours. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Booktrovert's Quick Questions interview.)

booktrovert's Reviews:

Many great elements, doesn’t QUITE stick the landing

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

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Bird Gardner is the son of an Asian woman, Margaret Miu, and a white father, Ethan. The first part of the novel is an explanation of how Bird’s mother, Margaret, separated from their family. Margaret made an intentional decision to leave Ethan and Bird, rather than face forced separation. The concept of forced separation is at the heart of this story – much like The Handmaid’s Tale, this is a dystopian near-future United States in which actual horrors of our past are enacted upon citizens in […]

“How will we learn about the world if not from each other?”

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

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Sneha immigrated to the United States from India with her parents when she was 17, and five years later (in 2012) she is attempting to begin her life after moving to Milwaukee. She has a corporate job that pays decently (for a 22 year old recent graduate with little debt) and includes a paid-for apartment as a perk. Most of this novel is about how Sneha spends most of that first year as a young person, one with some significant personal history she hasn’t fully […]

“What is memory if not a ghost?”

Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott

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Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day – how fitting, then, to review this book – an otherworldly almost fable, told in part by a haunted house on legs. This is not a world wholly immersed in fantasy; instead this is a work of magical realism, the kind where events both glorious but also, and maybe mostly, tragic become solid and explicit in unexpected ways. The world is mostly familiar to us – but also, in this world, houses that experience trauma might grow wings or legs. […]

“You’re stuck loving only hearts that can stop beating.”

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

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CBR Passport – 4, new to me author; 3 – different genre – this was a mix between fiction and, given the amount that is drawn from the author’s real life, a sort of memoir I’ll start this review with a content warning – Catherine Newman’s popular novel, her only novel to date as she mostly writes non-fiction essays and children’s books, is about the death of her childhood friend. Edi, based on Newman’s real friend Ali, is dying of cancer. I know that many […]

“We were not liars, but but we made our own truths …”

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

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Agnes is in her late twenties, married to Earl and living in America in the 1960s, when she hears about the death of her childhood friend, Fabienne. It’s mentioned, almost in passing, in a letter from her mother, who still lives in Saint Remy in France, the farm village where Agnes grew up. Upon hearing this news, Agnes reflects on her childhood with Fabienne, which is the main focus of the novel (not to mention Agnes’ life). As young girls coming of age in the […]

“Sometimes, one person’s death is another person’s parole papers.”

I'm Glad My Mother Died by Jeannette McCurdy

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The title quote is actually from the book I’m reading next – The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li – but it felt really apt for a title for the review of this book so I went with it. I think, at this point, most of us know what this book is about – Jeanette McCurdy, former star of shows like iCarly and Sam and Cat on Nickelodeon, wrote a memoir about her life with her abusive mother. The tone of the book is sort of akin […]



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