Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Zirza

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I am an English teacher from the Low Countries. Like everyone else I aspire to one day write a Booker Prize Winner, but until then I contend my self with reading stuff and writing about it. I try to keep the bitchiness to a minimum, but sometimes I can't help myself. In my spare time I enjoy complaining about the weather and sleeping. I lack the attention span for good books and the tolerance for bad ones. I am stuck in literary purgatory. Hey, at least it's warm here.

Zirza's Reviews:

Bittersweet Nothing

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

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Deep in the Australian outback lives the Bright clan. Older brother Nathan, a divorcee, lives alone on a small ranch; brothers Cameron and Bub share the larger ranch, where they live with their mother Liz, Cameron’s wife Ilse and their two young daughters. Each has their own demons to face but all in all, they make things work in the scorching climate of the Outback. Until one morning, when Cameron’s body is discovered near an old marker; a century-old grave. The man has been stuck […]

“If you are going to tell a lie, tell a good one”

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

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Juliet is in her early twenties when World War II starts, and like so many girls and women her age she finds herself working for MI5. This sounds more exciting than it is; mostly, Juliet types things. One day she is ordered to join a mission in a small flat in London, where an agent named Godfrey Tobey ingratiates himself with Nazi sympathisers.  I haven’t read the blurb at the back but I imagine it continues with something about Juliet not knowing what she’s getting […]

This Sh*t Is Bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S

Final Girls by Riley Sager

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A young woman stumbles out of the woods in a red dress, screaming loudly that someone is chasing her. A nearby police officer finds her and shoots the crazed killer, a psychopath who has escaped from a nearby mental hospital. Years later, Quincy is known as a ‘final girl’: the only survivor of a bloody massacre. There are other Final Girls and when one of them dies, another comes to find Quincy. Quincy, at first, is happy to have Sam with her: Sam knows what […]

Hell Hath No Fury

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

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A group of five men and five women set off on a corporate-sponsored hike through an Australian forest. The men emerge successfully three days later, happy to be done with it, to return to the hotel and its bar, but the women fail to appear. When they do, they are one person short: Alice Russell is missing. Detective Aaron Falk and his partner Carmen set off to investigate because Alice Russell is the whistleblower in their latest case. They soon discover that the women’s stories […]

Through the Looking Glass

Possession by A.S. Byatt

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Roland Mitchell is an unhappy man. Stuck in a job in academia in which he sees no future for himself, with a boss who seems to dislike him at every turn and a girlfriend who doesn’t appreciate him much either, he trundles along until he finds an unfinished letter in a book belonging to famed Victorian poet, Randolp Henry Ash. Along with fellow researcher Maud Bailey, Roland sets out to discover to whom Ash was writing.  I was warned beforehand that I would either adore […]

Freeze Frame

Still Life (Armand Gamache #1) by Louise Penny

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Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is called out to the town of Three Pines, where artist and beloved local icon Jane Neal has been found dead. At first this appears to be a hunting accident; Neal has been shot with an arrow in the middle of the woods. But all is not what it appears, and soon Gamache is trying to decipher who, in this tight-knit and small community could’ve killed Neal. I’m not much of a fan of the whole cozy genre, and I didn’t […]



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