Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

true story: my parents were called in for a meeting with the guidance counselor when I wrote a poem about bog sacrifices in third grade

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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…which I learned about from reading Spider magazine. Ghost Wall kicks off with a young woman being led to the peaty gloom before snapping back to a modern teenager forced to reenact the Iron Age with her father and the massive chip on his shoulder. Clocking in at a mere 130 pages, Ghost Wall bridges the expanse from ancient Britons to bored college students. Sarah Moss’s prose is sparse but lush; months worth of meditations shift and shimmer through the fog of just 130 pages.   A theme reigns supreme throughout […]

Men Are Terrible and Cannot Be Trusted

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

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Ghost Wall is a story about Sylvie, a seventeen year old girl, dragged along on an Iron Age reenactment in northern England with her father, Bill. Bill’s enthusiasm for the Iron Age is a hobby; he isn’t traditionally educated in the subject, and jumps at the opportunity to join Professor Jim Slade and his students for what is essentially a two-week summer LARP. He brings his wife, Alison, and his daughter, Sylvie, along for the ride. It becomes obvious early in the novel that Bill […]

Many self-loathing. Such love. Wow.

Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James

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Hi. My name is Anastasia Rose Steele. This is totally an actual person name and not made up in any way. I go by Ana, as in pro-Ana, because we share a sense of destructive self-loathing. Anyhoodle, can I just tell you about this totally charming guy I met? I hated him the first time I saw him. It was love at first sight. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. First of all, with my trim frame and my luscious brown hair […]

Do not give the sirens call a listen

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I am not sure when everyone slept in We Slept Here, unless it was a drug induced state, but Sierra DeMulder does a lot of other things, too. She does not hold back. She gives you the picture of a girl growing up in a family that allowed abuse. Oh, dad did not hit mom, so that is how they justified it, but it is forever burned into her brain her father yelling and her mother taking it. She does not hold back. She gives […]

I love cheesy 90s YA horror

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First, this book was great, and I’m reminded of my oft-forgotten intention to find more Sleator.  If you like Stine, but want a slightly older and more sci-fi bent, then you’ll love his books.  I read Singularity years ago and kept an eye out for my own copy to buy ever since, which I picked up just recently.  I found THE BOXES in a Shoprite used book sale-I think the money goes towards food kitchens-and immediately grabbed it. Second, I should mention that, for those […]

“How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought . . .” #CBRBingo

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“Everything was under control. No, he mustn’t think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster’s wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. […]



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