Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About crystalclear

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Crystalclear can usually think of something clever to say, except when she can't. She has a giant stack of unread books at home but will always find an excuse to buy/acquire/borrow another one. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: crystalclear's Quick Questions interview.)

crystalclear's Reviews:

The reviews I forgot to post, part 2!

Unplugged and Unpopular by Mat Heagerty, Tintin Pantoja, and Mika Amante

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I heard about this book at Comic Con (or Book Con, I can’t remember.)  It’s the story of a middle school girl, Erin Song, who loses her technology privileges and can suddenly see aliens!  Erin is not the most popular kid in school, so when the popular girl in her class asks her to help her cheat on a quiz, Erin agrees.  But then she gets caught, and her parents take away all of her screen time – phone, laptop, tablet, tv, and video games.  […]

The reviews I forgot to post, part 1!

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

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Somehow I ended up reading three dystopian novels in a row. Maybe not the best choice during an actual pandemic.  Wilder Girls is set in an all-girls boarding school on an isolated island off the coast of Maine.  About a year and a half before the novel starts, something… happened.  A sort of disease that was probably already present on the island suddenly made an evolutionary jump from two species (an iris and a crab) to everything else, including people.  The disease, which they call […]

Two books I had not intended on reviewing together

The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton

Poisoned by Jennifer Donnelly

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The Belles By Dhonielle Clayton   In this world, most people are born unattractive – they have grey skin, red eyes, and straw-like hair. There are a few who are not so, and who look like what we think of as regular people.  These people are called Belles, and they have the power, somehow, of making other people “beautiful.”  They can change someone’s skin color, eye color, hair color and texture and length, and even change bone structure and muscle.  But these changes are like […]

A truly awful book to blackout my bingo card!

Mary Bennet and the Bloomsbury Coven by Beth Deitchman

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So, this is another published Pride and Prejudice fanfiction.  I mean, so are all of them I suppose, but even the title screams “fanfic.”  And if I had come across this book with this description online, I would have passed it by.  But a hard copy was handed to me, and so I set out to read it.  So let’s journey together, shall we? *Note – will contain massive spoilers*   It’s bad.  Mary has taken to reading novels instead of more “serious” works, her […]

Impractical knowledge is still knowledge!

How To by Randall Monroe

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I need to stop having expectations for books.  I thought this was going to be more like his book What If? which had strange situations and then gave a scientific method of answering the question.  This is taking a theoretically normal problem, but then solving it (still scientifically) in the weirdest and most impractical way possible.     (The version I have is an ARC, and I’m reading it on my phone, so things don’t always line up correctly. Which isn’t great, but hey, I didn’t […]

Make sure you vote!

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

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Well, this was an interesting read right before the 2020 U.S. Presidential election!  There are parts in this that are hilarious, heartbreaking, and harrowing.  You have a romance story involving politics, and in both the book and in real life, the election of 2020 is super stressful!  (In the book, if the incumbent president loses, she steps down and a gross white man takes her place. In real life, if the incumbent president wins, thousands more people will needlessly die.  A bit more stressful for […]



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