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:

Envision that Circumcision and Feel that Eel

Under the Knife by Arnold van der Laar

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I’ve always wanted to be a doctor. That didn’t pan out, and I’m fine with that, but the interest in all things medical has lingered. Because I was planning to read more non-fiction anyway, I picked up this book on a whim, and although I wasn’t disappointed, it lacks a certain degree of depth. More subcutaneous than intraosseal, if you please. Van de Laar – who is a surgeon himself – takes us through the history of medicine, and specifically surgery, but instead of telling […]

Breasting Boobily

Believe Me by JP Delaney

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There’s a blurb on the back of Believe Me from a review by The Daily Mail: ‘Slick, sexy, suspenseful and smart.’ It’s the Daily Mail so this should be taken with a grain of salt either way, but I can think of a few better s-words to describe this novel. Soporific. Sophomoric. Sexist. Shitty. And let’s not forget the main one: stupid. So very stupid. That isn’t to say there’s nothing to enjoy there, but it’s enjoyable the way a really bad film is: it […]

Small Misunderstandings and Major Desillusions

Broken Harbour by Tana French

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Primarily, reviews are about preference: did I like this book? Was it good? Usually, the two converge; what is or what isn’t good is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. Occasionally, though, these two interlinked questions separate themselves. So what do you do when a book is very good, but you’re not sure you liked it? Experienced detective Michael “Scorcher” Kennedy is called to investigate an unusually grisly crime scene: at a half-finished housing development – abandoned during the financial crisis – a […]

Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?

In the Woods by Tana French

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Detective novels are a difficult concept to grasp, at some level. Why do we purposely seek out the sort of thing – violence, grisly murders, sex crimes, blood and viscera – we would do anything to avoid in real life? Then there are the tropes of the genre itself that work both for and against it, from the hyperconfident, competent yet over-empathic medical examiner to the tortured detective from a broken home and, more tellingly, the killer’s psychopathy. The majority of all murders are crimes […]

Our House, in the Middle of our Heath

The Likeness by Tana French

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I used to share a house with nine other people. They were cool people, all nine of them, but it was still far from perfect. I lacked a sense of privacy, even with my own room. I prefer going about things on my own. I can only imagine what it must have been like to spend every night in forceful merriment. In that sense, I tip my hat in the direction of the main character of The Likeness. Detective Cassandra “Cassie” Maddox receives a phone […]

Love of the Common People

Faithful Place by Tana French

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On a street in a working class neighbourhood in Dublin, in the mid-eighties, nineteen year old Francis ‘Frank’ Mackey stands outside, in the middle of the night, waiting for his girlfriend, Rosie, with whom he is about to make a run for England. She never shows up. Twenty years later, Frank, now a member of Dublin’s undercover police force, receives a call from his panicked relatives. Someone has found Rosie’s suitcase in an abandoned house at the end of the street, and Frank’s theory that […]



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