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:

Guilty as Charged

We Are All Guilty Here (North Falls #1) by Karin Slaughter

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Emmy Clifton works as a cop for a small town police force. At the start of the novel, she’s at the town’s fourth of July celebrations. She picks a fight with her no-good husband, then brushes off Madison, her friend’s teenage daughter. And then Madison disappears along with her friend Cheyenne. All that is found are the girls’ discarded bikes, and a large puddle of blood.  Slaughter rose to fame with her Grant County series, and those books will always have a special place in […]

Midsomer Murders-Y

The Word is Murder (Hawthorne and Horowitz #1) by Anthony Horowitz

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Anthony Horowitz is a reasonably well-known writer. He’s written Sherlock Holmes stories (with the express approval of Conan Doyle’s descendants, mind you). He’s written episodes of Midsomer Murders – the early ones, before the thing went haywire and we began to wonder why this quaint English district had such a high homicide rate. He’s doing well for himself. Therefore, when the boorish Daniel Hawthorne approaches him and asks him to collaborate on a novel, he is inclined to turn him down. Yet somehow, Hawthorne – […]

“The meaning of something so fleeting, life. Here and gone.”

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

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Brothers Peter (32) and Ivan (22) could not be more different. Peter is a successful human rights lawyer and university lecturer, attractive, a social butterfly. Ivan, on the other hand, is an underemployed, underachieving chess player. He’s awkward and while he’s not ugly, his second-hand clothing (a deliberate choice made for ethical, not financial reasons) and braces make him a far cry from his more glamorous brother. They are both still grieving from the death of their father from cancer, a few months prior. Instead […]

Let Me Forget

Let Me Lie by Clare Mackintosh

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Anna Johnson is home alone with her eight week old daughter. It’s nearly Christmas, and Anna is struggling. Around this time last year, her mother took her own life. She jumped off the cliff in a copycat move that also took the life of Anna’s father several months prior to that. Anna’s partner Mark is loving and supportive, but when Anna receives a mysterious note that tells her her parents’ death may not have been suicide after all, he tries to talk her out of […]

You Can Never Go Home

Girl A by Abigail Dean

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When we meet Lex Gracie, she is on her way to the prison where her mother has died. Her mother has left the few possessions she has to her children. Lex is the executor of her will. Lex, though, wants nothing to do with her mother. We learn why as the novel continues: years ago, the Gracie children were freed from what the press has deemed a “house of horrors”, where the starving children were chained to their beds as their increasingly erratic father fell […]

Deeply Dippy

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Mosfegh

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The year is 2000, the place is downtown Manhattan. Our protagonist is young, beautiful and rich. She has a degree in art history from a prestigious university and a job at a trendy art gallery. On the face of it, she is living the Manhattan dream, but she is deeply unhappy. All she wants is to sleep. Her theory is that her cells will renew themselves that way, that she will thus become a new person. So she locks herself into her apartment, takes staggering […]



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