Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About jeverett15

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39 years old. New Jersey resident. Fan of mystery novels, classic literature, and non-fiction about movies, television, sports, and American history.

jeverett15's Reviews:

Cutting Room Floor

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Montserrat is a sound editor at a second-rate Mexican film studio, struggling to stay in the good graces of her sexist boss and living life mostly on her own. Aside from her cancer-stricken sister, her only real company is her childhood friend Tristan, a former soap opera star now resorting to voice-over work to make ends meet. The relationship between the two friends has a lived-in, comfortable feel, though Montserrat’s long-standing crush on Tristan is an unacknowledged open secret between the pair. They’re the kind […]

Our Town, Is a Very, Very, Very Small Town

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

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On a cherry farm in Michigan, a family unexpectedly reunited by the COVID pandemic struggles to find ways to pass the time until their father drops a bombshell revelation: the handsome actor in the old favorite movie they’re watching used to be their mother’s boyfriend. Pressed into recounting the tale, 57-year-old Lara spins a yarn about a long ago summer spent putting on Our Town at a local theater company and falling in love with her co-star. Intrigued by the connection to a celebrity or […]

Rabbit Season

Bunny by Mona Awad

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Samantha Heather Mackey is a second-year graduate student in the creative writing program at Warren University, an idyllic Northeastern campus surrounded by a grimy, dangerous, urban area. Her fiction workshop consists, for the second consecutive year, of just five students, all women. Samantha is most definitely the odd one out. The other four students have formed the ultimate clique. They seem to operate with a hive-mind, to the point where they all call each other by the same nickname: Bunny. Excessively girly and obsessed with […]

In Her Own Land

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

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I only became aware of Prophet Song when it won the Booker Prize over Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, a big, important book about one of the defining issues of our time. I was selling Paul Lynch short. Prophet Song is more compact than The Bee Sting, but it’s also an important book about the world we live in. Eilish Stack is a middle-aged, middle-class Irish woman working in a science lab and raising four children with her husband Larry, a leader in the teacher’s […]

Octopus’s Garden-Variety Novel

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

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Seventy-year-old Tova Sullivan works as a cleaner at a local aquarium to keep busy after the death of her husband. While doing so, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Marcellus, who happens to be a Giant Pacific octopus. Marcellus is not just any ordinary sea creature, however. He is supremely intelligent and a cunning escape artist, prone to late-night adventures like invading the other creatures’ habitats and even the aquarium’s offices. Marcellus even narrates some chapters, dating each from the start of his captivity, […]

What the Dickens is This?

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

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It’s perhaps emblematic of the problems with The Fraud that I had so much trouble figuring out how to describe it to you. The Fraud of the title most obviously refers to the real-life court case inspiring the narrative, in which a man arrives in London claiming to be the long-lost Sir Roger Tichborne and demanding his inheritance. To most people, the claimant is a transparent fraud, whose story doesn’t hold up to the smallest amount of scrutiny. However, he becomes a cause celebre among […]



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