Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A runner. A writer. A Pokémon fighter.

carmelpie's Reviews:

Careening over the cliff, crashing into the ocean, and exploding on impact.

The Favorites by Layne Fargo

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They didn’t simply want us to be lovers. They wanted us to be so in love, we’d burn the whole world down to be together. ― Layne fargo, The Favorites I have a backlog of reviews to write, but it took a truly bonkers story to yank me out of my holding pattern, tear open my window, and scream into the void. The Favorites is that story. This book has everything. Buckets of blood? Check. Violently gory injuries with ice skates? Check. Skating partners who […]

Do not mistake this kindness. I simply want to be the one who breaks you.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

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His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything. ― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Ever feel like running away from your life and forming an everlasting pact with a hot demon you meet in the woods on the day of your wedding? Addie didn’t feel like it either but that’s what happened. It’s 1729 in rural France. Addie is twenty-three, single, a dreamer, an artist, and has zero interest in succumbing to the […]

The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube

Crush by Richard Siken

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I learned about Richard Siken through Pinterest of all things. For those of you who frequent Pinterest, especially those dedicated to romantic pairings from books, the boards are littered with snippets of poetry rendered in retro fonts. Bits of Siken’s poem Little Beast kept showing up in my feed. However, finding a copy of his Yale Series of Younger Poets poetry collection was challenging and I had to special-order it from the UK. Since it is only sixty-two pages plus a forward, I thought I […]

Have you ever met a rich man somebody didn’t want to kill?

Hither, Page: Page and Sommers Book #1 by Cat Sebastian

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Probably he had the honest man’s instinctive distaste for subverting the course of justice. That was a luxury Leo never had. If only honest men knew how many lives had been saved with a bit of criminal conspiracy, they’d think it one of the cardinal virtues. ― Cat Sebastian, Hither, Page Leo Page and James Sommers end up in the same small English village in the years following WWII. James is a physician and he returned to the small village where he lived with his […]

He was handsome, Ben supposed, if you liked angry men.

It Takes Two to Tumble (Seducing the Sedgwicks, #1) by Cat Sebastian

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This was some unholy combination of desire and friendship and something else, because apparently when you took workaday lust and combined it with affection and threw in garden-variety honesty, you got something new and totally different.” ― Cat Sebastian, It Takes Two to Tumble At the start of the novel, Captain Phillip Dacre returned home from a two year voyage with the royal navy. His dutiful wife, Caroline, passed away while he was at sea, and he braced himself to face three children he barely […]

Eighteen minutes. That’s how long you’ve got to hold ’em.

Tanqueray by Stephanie Johnson and Brandon Stanton

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Stephanie Johnson became famous later in life via the popular blog, “Humans of New York.” I learned of her a couple of months ago when a vignette of one of her stories showed up in my Instagram feed. It was the story of how she became a dominatrix in 1980’s New York. When I searched for more stories, I learned that she had a memoir titled Tanqueray, which was her burlesque stage name. Stephanie has a distinct voice, and Stanton did a lovely job of […]



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