Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Good evening, everyone. I'm Leslie Monster, and this is Nightline. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: narfna's Quick Questions interview.)

narfna's Reviews:

This could have been so much better.

Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns, #1) by Kendare Blake

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As many reviewers have pointed out before me, this book has a great premise, but a lot of that is wasted on the execution of it. The degree to which you think it’s wasted varies in most of my friends’ reviews, but there does seem to be a consensus that wasted premise is the main problem. It also falls into several YA cliché-traps that I really wish it hadn’t, and just goes far enough in pushing the boundaries of the genre for it to be […]

Part history of mental health, part investigation into an infamous mental health study.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

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When I read Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience with psychosis, I became a little obsessed with it. (The Netflix adaptation was disappointing, as the clever hook in the book was her investigating her own illness from an outside perspective, something she could do as she lost most of her memory from when she was sick. The film just follows it straight. But that’s a digression.) Brain on Fire is an extremely readable memoir about a very scary and rare thing that […]

This should really be titled The Secret History of Wonder Woman’s Creators.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

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This wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was pretty good all the same. I think this three star rating is due to two things: 1) I was expecting more of a history of Wonder Woman the character with some stuff about her creator(s) thrown in as well, and what I got was a history of her creator(s) in full, along with a healthy side order of what was actually going on in history at the time, with an emphasis on the history of feminism, […]

A ghost story, almost-horror-novel-but-not, for people who don’t really like ghost stories or horror. And people who do!

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

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I don’t normally do ghost stories, but I recently joined Book of the Month, and this was the only one of January’s books that seemed like something I might really like, so I ordered it. Plus it was also being touted as a mystery and a thriller, it fit well with my January theme of reading books by and about badass ladies (double check on that here) and with my run of books about shitty men doing bad things to women and girls. Also it’s […]

“Men are everywhere. If I ran away from here, there would be more men all over the world.”

Dead Girls by Abigail Tarttelin

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Wow. I tell you what, wow. That’s a reference to the 1997 animated film Anastasia that I am pulling out now as a special occasion, because this book deserves it. I mean, wow. So before I get to why I’m wowing all over this review, the plot: It’s spring 1999 in a small English countryside village. Eleven year-old Thera and Billie have been best friends (“best, true, forever friends”) since before they were even born. Thera and Billy are imaginative, playful, and clever, and right […]

I really need half stars on this one.

Sadie by Courtney Summers

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Firstly, I’m nearly certain that I would have given this four stars unreservedly had I not done the audio version. YMMV, obviously, on all books. But here, the audio really pulled me out of the story. I’ll explain. So this book is about bad things that happen to girls, and it’s split into two parts that alternate every other chapter. The first is a fake podcast with a host who is trying to track down the missing 19 year old, Sadie Hunter, after a family […]



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