Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Speculative Fiction Western

Outlawed by Anna North

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Westerns are not a genre I usually enjoy due to the high incidence of hangings amidst the dust, however, this came highly recommended and I’m glad I read it.  In Outlawed, Anna North presents an alternate history wherein a massive flu pandemic in the 1800s wiped out the majority of humanity, leaving the survivors to try to repopulate and pick up the pieces.  As a result of the drastic fall in population, childbearing is considered every woman’s duty, and barren women are at best considered […]

“And so I began my criminal career there in the house of God, with a leaky pen instead of a pistol and books instead of silver for my reward.”

Outlawed by Anna North

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I still don’t know how I feel about this one and it’s been over a month. It was a super fast read, read it only about three hours, and parts of it I really liked, I guess overall I just wasn’t in the mood for a story that wasn’t all HEAs all over the place. Or that at least didn’t kill the one character I liked the most. Thanks for that, by the way. Outlawed is an alternate history western set in 1894-5, in a […]

The Narrators Were More Interesting, but Only Some of Them

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North

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CBR11 Bingo Square: Listicle As found on the Book Riot list of “100 Must-Read Bisexual Books” https://bookriot.com/2017/09/21/100-must-read-bisexual-books/ I saw a lot of good reviews for this novel, and was excited to read it, given how it appeared to center on meaningful relationships (my favourite!), as well as the career of a filmmaker (something of great interest to me!). And yet, this is one of those cases where despite seeming like it has a lot of people who love it, I myself just don’t get it, […]

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

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I wish I hadn’t waited so long to write this review because now it’s harder to remember why exactly I found this book emotionally compelling (but I did). It’s an interesting trick that Anna North uses—to tell the story of a person through the eyes and experiences of people around her—and I think it works, precisely because Sophie Stark is a filmmaker, who creates stories of others’ lives so it makes sense that others should tell her story. The basic plot of Sophie’s life is […]

The Mystery of Sophie Stark

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The Life of Sophie Stark is a collection of short stories written by people who were affected by Sophie Stark, a creative but cold film maker. Sophie would best be described as a manic pixie nightmare girl; she was one of those permanently damaged characters that everyone worshipped. Allison, the star of Sophie’s first feature film as well as Jacob, the musician who meets Sophie on a music video shoot that leads to their marriage, talk about falling in love with the work of Sophie […]

Sophie Stark

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I freaking devoured this book. It was so good! The writing, the suspense, all of it. And while it’s hard to really love Sophie Stark, I did find myself feeling like I understood her at least, by the end. “It’s hard for me to talk about love,’ she said. ‘I think movies are the way I do that.” The Life and Death of Sophie Stark is a collection of stories about Sophie Stark, told from perspectives of her lovers, coworkers, friends and her brother. They detail the […]



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