Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Rooooomie

CBR13 participant

Trying to rid myself of the terrible habit of reading more about books than reading actual books.

Rooooomie's Reviews:

A surprise from the past

The Listening House by Mabel Seeley

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Bingo: Fauna It’s 1938. Gwynne Dacres is a young, divorced copywriter who has just been sacked because of a mistake her boss made. Having to make ends meet on a tighter budget, she finds a cheap set of rooms in a boarding house owned by a Mrs Garr. While her new lodgings and neighbors seem fine at first, it’s not long before a dead body shows up. And then another one. Gwynne sets out to discover what is happening inside the house, and before long […]

What was that ending?

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck

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Bingo: They she he (the author uses they/them pronouns, though there appear to be only cis characters in this book) I can’t remember why I decided to buy this book. It’s dystopian, which used to be my favorite genre, but after three years of running a dystopian/post-apocalyptic book club, it doesn’t interest me much anymore. The premise of this book is somewhat interesting, though. The setting is an area that consists of four relatively small colonies. Of course there is a totalitarian regime in place, […]

Girlhood, friendships, and lies that go too far

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida

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Bingo: landscape I have a soft spot for stories about teenage girls, even more so when they’re written for an adult audience. I suppose it is a self-indulgent subject, but I really enjoy reading about the inner lives of girls and their friendships. One of my favorite novels in this little genre is Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, which is so honest and incisive that it was a bit painful to read. Vendela Vida has a similar ability to expose the inner workings of teenage female […]

An introduction to the horrors of life in rural India

The Good Girls by Sonia Faleiro

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Bingo: uncannon In a small, rural village in India’s largest state, two teenage girls, Padma and Lalli, go missing one evening. A few hours later they are found, hanging from a mango tree in a nearby field. A family member saw them using a mobile phone to call a boy from a nearby village; did he rape and kill them? Or was it an honor killing carried out by the girls’ families? The Good Girls is a work of narrative journalism that brings in scores […]

Women’s pain manifested as madness

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

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The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness. Bingo: People CW: rape, sexual assault, suicide Joan has just witnessed a man shooting himself in a crowded restaurant, where she was eating dinner with her lover, a married man. After this traumatic event, she decides to drive from New York to California, looking for a woman named Alice, who she thinks can help her unravel her past. One of the […]

A raging fire that begins to surface

The Low, Low Woods by Carmen Maria Machado

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Bingo: Gateway TW for the book: rape, sexual assault, stereotypical red-headed pimpled misogynistic teenage boys. If creepy settings, queer POC characters, and reckoning with sexual assault are your thing, this is your book. I went into this comic TP completely blind, having picked it up only because I knew Carmen Maria Machado was the writer behind it. Machado can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned, she’s a stunning writer. El and Vee are best friends living in the town of Shudder-To-Think, Pennsylvania, where […]



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