Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I know it may be wrong but, I’m in love with [Sadie’s] mom

Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakely-Cartwright

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Fountains of Wayne, the poet laureates of New Jersey, wrote the eternal hymn “Stacy’s Mom” way back in the halcyon days of 2003: “Stacey’s mom has got it going on”. How could they have known that a cool twenty years later we would now be saying the same thing about Sadie’s mom?! Is this just a smutty book about an eternally messed up friendship and family? Yes and no. Alice and Sadie are best friends. Alice is a cypher and Sadie is an anal-retentive nightmare. […]

“She was probably wearing real Chanel Vamp nail polish, not knockoff Revlon Vixen”

Justine by Forsyth Harmon

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Ali is bored, lonely, and smitten. Justine is bold, aloof, and irresistible. The girls meet in a Long Island Stop & Shop in the summer of 1999. I’ve been quoting from this song a lot lately, but as John Darnielle said so perfectly in “Old College Try”: Things will shortly get completely out of hand There is something visceral about peeking back into the mind of a suburban tri-state-area teen. This book stuck with me like the frequently mentioned feeling of bare thighs sticking to […]

The Repercussions of Drugging Unwitting Children (And Other Things)

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  This book was one of those that I liked, but I also didn’t much like it, or at least I didn’t really like or understand the characters in it. Yes, that’s it exactly. I didn’t understand a single one of the many characters in this book. And that’s not entirely my fault. In Commonwealth, one of the children of a blended family falls in love with a much older writer and ends up telling him stories about her childhood. And he ends up writing […]



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