Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bingo #4

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

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In an effort to read some spooky literature for this, the high holy season of Halloween, I went for one of my comfortable standbys, good old Neil Gaiman. Winning both the Hugo and the Nebula awards in 2003 and 2004 for best novella, Coraline deserves all the acclaim it received. Clocking in at only a little over 100 pages, Gaiman works his magic to build a terrifying little universe in a short space. Even though this book was in the children’s section of my library, […]

Some Young Adult to close out Bingo

Enchantee by Gita Trelease

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

The Lady Rogue by Jenn Bennett

The Lovely War by Julie Berry

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  Four more reviews to finish catching up on my backlog. CBR11Bingo squares for I Love This (Enchantee), Award Winner (Speak), Far and Away (the Lady Rogue) and Reader’s Choice over Own Voices (The Lovely War).   Enchantee (apologies, but I can’t figure out how to accent the ‘e’) is a beautifully written young adult romance. Set in Paris during the final days of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI’s excesses, it shows both the splendor of the rich and the desperation of the poor. Camille […]

Red Tinted Glasses and Painted on Time

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

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After reading this book I read an interview with the author in the back. In this interview she mentioned that her goal was to make a “completely unfilmable book.” I have to say that, at least in my opinion, she very much succeeded. I cannot imagine how this could ever be adapted without major changes of many kinds. This is the story of Estha and Rahel, two egg twins. It is also the story of their Ammu. It is also the story of an English […]

Opacities (Blackout Bingo, Award winners)

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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Ok, I had half started this review for my penultimate bingo square, and then realized that I almost missed the opportunity to make this book LITERALLY TITLED ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE AND FEATURING A BLIND PROTAGONIST my blackout finish. Luckily I realized my error in time to finish strong. This book follows Marie-Laure, a girl with congenital cataracts which have left her blind, in Nazi-occupied France. Her father, a locksmith for the Museum, is one of four employees sent with a priceless gem […]

A quiet fantasy that speaks to the heart (#AwardWinner)

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

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One of the truly loveliest fantasies I read this year was The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. This one came highly recommended to me on a facebook group where I asked for non-grimdark, political intrigue fantasy. The recommender really hit the mark, and I recommend it to any lover of fantasy! It’s steampunk but not in-your-face about it, bittersweet but not everything-is-s*** like grimdark, and it’s also an award winner! It won the 2015 Locus Award (and was also nominated for the 2014 Nebula and the […]

The things we do in the shadows

Blindness by Jose Saramago

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Do you like bleak dystopian novels full of bad things happening to humanity in general and certain characters (usually women) in particular? Is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road your jam?  Then this book might be right up your alley. Set in the present day, we watch as characters named only by descriptors (the doctor, the doctor’s wife, the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, etc.) are struck down by epidemic of ‘white blindness’.  We start with patient zero, a man who suddenly […]



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