Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About drmllz

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I'm a literature and media studies lecturer and researcher at a university on the south coast of England (my reviews are absolutely not meant to be taken in my professional capacity nor reflect the views of my institution). I've participated in some early CBRs and then came back for CBR 14 onwards. Much like every year, I'd like to do more reading for fun, especially of contemporary fiction, and less crashing in front of Netflix. In 2021 I had a cancer diagnosis and surgery--it really helped following along with CBR reads and Facebook chat and knowing there were people out there enjoying reading books and supporting cancer research and patients even amid all the pandemic chaos.

drmllz's Reviews:

“To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier”

The Gilded Ones (2021) by Namina Forna

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CBR Bingo 15 square Africa, because author Namina Forna was born and raised in Sierra Leone, on the west coast, a former British colony. It was first called Serra Lyoa, or Lion Mountain, because it was first “discovered” by Pedro de Sintra, a Portuguese explorer in the 15th century, who feared lions in the rolling of thunder in the hills around the harbour. I know this because I learned it in school, because when I was little I went to school in said hills, and […]

“And say your mea culpa, which you gradually forgot”

Ride the Pink Horse (1946) by Dorothy B. Hughes

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Cannonball Read 15 Bingo Square “On the Road”: Three men have travelled from Chicago to Santa Fe in a complicated game of cat and mouse I think that Dorothy B. Hughes’s writing, at its best, possesses a terrible beauty, to borrow a phrase from W.B. Yeats’s “Easter, 1916.” Elsewhere, of course, Yeats wrote that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, a fragment of a phrase that beats at the dark heart of noir fiction, where comforting myths of love, or integrity, or fairness implode […]

“Rows of houses all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me”

The Hours Before Dawn (1958) by Celia Fremlin

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In the autumn of 2011, I played Bella Manningham in an amateur dramatic production of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller Gas Light, which has given its name to the practice of deliberately undermining someone’s conception of their own sanity for selfish or sinister purposes. Bella is the wife who sees lights flicker, whose things won’t stay where she left them, who is increasingly convinced that she is disappearing deeper and deeper into her own mad mind.  “You mustn’t go on lying here in the dark, or […]

What if Carrie had supportive friends and family?

Hexed (2021) by Julia Tuffs

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Bingo square ‘Bodies, Bodies’: The main character has to deal with the uncontrollable nature of her own body and its possibly controllable impulses, and there’s also discussion of how men feel entitled to women’s bodies and reducing women to bodies. Hexed (2021) is a witchy YA book and a fun short-ish read. After being forced to move around a lot by her slightly flaky mother, Jessie Jones has just started at a new high school near her family’s roots on the Isle of Wight (a […]

“An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched”

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012) by emily m. danforth

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CBR Bingo square “Queer Lives”: The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a queer YA novel, and was banned in a middle school in 2015 in Delaware for “inappropriate language.” I mean, fuck that. The novel was also criticised by the School Library Journal for its length and pacing, and my inclination is also to say fuck that, but I do understand that this is the kind of thing where YMMV. It did take a while to get into, but I was fully immersed when I did. […]

Shoulder pads and shootouts

G is for Gumshoe (1990) by Sue Grafton

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CBR Bingo Square: Relation”ship” (Fiercely independent PI Kinsey Millhone has to allow fiercely protective PI Robert Dietz be her bodyguard) I read a bunch of the ‘Alphabet Mystery’ series in my teens, when there was somehow time to read everything, and I would stock up on library books rather than booze for staying up all night on New Year’s Eve. They star, and are usually narrated by, Private Investigator Kinsey Millhone, a young-ish woman in California. She and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski (1982-2022) were probably […]



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