Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Featured Review Archive

These reviews, which were promoted in CBR social media, on our homepage, and in Pajiba Love, appear below by review publication date, not by date featured.

 

OK, I Need to Talk About These Books

Crush by Eve Newton

Destroy by Eve Newton

Reclaim by Eve Newton

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NOTE:  This review will contain spoilers for the overall series – stop reading now if you want to remain unspoiled.  Thumbnail: I won’t tell you to read or not to read these, but take the author’s note/trigger warnings seriously.  If you read them, and worry that something is going to trigger you – it will.  There are no holds barred in these novels, and there is a high level of violence.  Sexual assault is depicted on multiple occasions. Well.  I read all three of these […]

So Many Ideas and Questions about Year 2 at Riverdale Academy Day School

Class Act by Jerry Craft

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Class Act continues the story of the Riverdale Academy Day School gang, but emphasizes Drew’s experiences a bit more and it also starts to include other challenges of growing up, particularly physical and emotional/relationship maturity. It is now eight grade, so the group is in their second year together. In a lot of ways, there’s a lot more going on here in volume 2, both story and meaning-wise. In the previous volume that focuses on Jordan, Drew is a fellow student of color, but instead […]

“Don’t worry about any of this stuff, okay? It’s all just adult junk that doesn’t mean anything.”

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki, Jillian Tamaki

by 1 Comment

This One Summer is a re-read for me. It is also the book I have read in the past few years specifically from the Banned Book List put out by the ALA that makes me scratch my head the most. It is because this is the book that hit #1 most challenged in 2016 and was why I read it in 2017. It then came back to the top ten in 2018. It did not make sense to me then, and it makes little sense […]

And What Comes After Bans?

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

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Read as part of CBR15bingo: gender and banned. Maia Kobabe is a non-binary writer whose book Gender Queer has been banned at many schools and libraries across the country.  It almost made perfect sense that when I saw I had to read a banned book on gender for this challenge, I’d get to Maia Kobabe’s work. Maia’s book seems to have been the spark that ignited the fires of book banning in Florida. I will not argue that most Americans have a complex understanding of gender. […]

Toni Morrison (1)

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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I was just reading Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar, and she discusses Beloved briefly as a Madea story. This is true in the sense that the plot of Beloved involves Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman now ten or more years after the Civil War, living in a house in Ohio that is haunted by some sort of presence. Sethe too is a quite haunted woman. In a moment of abject fear and panic, some years earlier Sethe kills her infant daughter when she believes that she’s […]

Obscure Sex Fantasies Don’t Have to Make Sense

Reckless Heir by Jenika Snow

by 6 Comments

Listen, is this book good? No. Not really. It’s got a weird obsession with a particularly Victorian idea of virginity, and only the loosest possible concept of the physical logistics of real human sex. It’s distracting. These people need, like, so much sex ed. And also probably to see several doctors. And then to hire somebody to come and clean ALL of their furniture. But is this book compelling? Yeah, actually. Like, I get it. Until somewhat recently, I really didn’t see the appeal of […]



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