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:

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

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Imagine this: you and your friends go on a celebratory weekend holiday to a luxurious yet remote retreat. You all go way back: to university, to secondary school, perhaps even before that. Yet inevitably your lives have drifted apart since then. You’ve all grown up, you’ve all changed, which makes it all the more awkward when everyone tries and fails to fit back into the roles you used to occupy. Maybe your dowdy best friend is now more successful than you, and you try not […]

Chitinous Critters and Cardboard Cutouts

Phantoms by Dean Koontz

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One late afternoon, sisters Jenny and Lisa Paige drive up to Snowfield, CA, a small ski resort village where Jenny works as a doctor. Lisa, her fourteen year old half sister, comes to live with her after the death of their mother. Though Jenny is used to the town being quiet, when she drives through it she notices that the lights are on but nobody’s home (which is, in and of itself, an accurate description of any character in this novel, but I digress). As […]

Death in Paradise

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin

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On the Caribbean island of Saint X, a wealthy family from upstate New York vacations: a father, a mother, and their two daughters, eighteen year old Alison and seven year old Claire. They are nice enough, if oblivious. The father asks the waiter for good local restaurants so he can sample a ‘real’ dish. They tip well, give friendly smiles, try to make awkward conversation. Claire, an awkward, gangly child, quietly builds sandcastles and hopes her sister will help her. Alison, meanwhile, sneaks off behind […]

Of Lice and Men

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

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Nothing endures. Don’t you see, Bonox? That’s what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.  On the face of it, the plot of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about war: […]

Return to Sender

Bring me Back by BA Paris

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I love a good detective novel, but one of my main problems within the genre is that so many of these novels would have been over in less than ten pages if the main characters had just had the common sense to call the police, especially because 90% of the main characters in these novels are white middle class men and women. Someone leaves dead animals on your doorstep? Call the police. You receive threatening emails from someone pretending to be your dead relative? Call […]

Waif Goodbye

Tooth and Nail (Inspector Rebus #3) by Ian Rankin

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London, early 1990s. Women are being attacked on the streets; their throats are slit, they’re stabbed in an unfortunate place and a bite mark is left on their stomachs. The first attack happens on Wolf street and thus the press, with their neverending creativity, dub him the Wolfman. Inspector John Rebus – lapsed Christian, alcoholic in denial, still straddling the line between ‘difficult person’ and ‘asshole’ – is called down to aid the investigation, but by whom? And why?  This is a curiously chaotic novel […]



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