Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Dysfunction Junction

Sisters: A Novel by Daisy Johnson

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If you enjoy a novel with a questionable/unreliable narrator, then Sisters is for you. Clocking in at just over 200 pages, it is the kind of book you could get through in a day, and the plot is such that the reader will want to find out exactly what has happened and why. This makes it a little tricky to review without spoilers, but here we go. Teenagers July and September are sisters, with only 10-months difference in their ages. September is definitely the dominant […]

“We need new songs.”

The Silence of the Girls: A Novel by Pat Barker

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I recently reviewed Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles for CBR12 bingo, and I referred to it as a gateway into a genre I call “reimagined classics” or “classics fanfic”. The Silence of the Girls is yet another outstanding addition to this genre and it happens to overlap with The Song of Achilles, presenting several main characters and incidents from The Iliad from a very different perspective. Pat Barker imagines for us the life of Briseis, a Trojan princess who becomes Achilles’ slave. Through the […]

Can you imagine a life where all you have to do is summer in the Italian countryside?

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

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CBR12 BINGO: I Wish Double BINGO! Vertical: The Roaring 20s, Pandemic, Friendship, Green, I Wish Horizontal: Money, No Money, Repeat, I Wish, Violet The title of my review comes from the classic episode of The Office in which we learn about the Finer Things Club. Oscar: Can you imagine a life where all you have to do is summer in the Italian countryside? Pam: And spend time with George Emerson. That’s what I would do. That sums up why I selected A Room with a View […]

Magical Friendship: cbr12bingo – “Friendship”

Phoebe and Her Unicorn in The Magic Storm by Dana Simpson

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“Phoebe and Her Unicorn” began as a web comic by Dana Simpson in 2012 and then a few years later became a syndicated comic strip in newspapers, that is still in active publication.  The first five books in the series are compilations of those comics.  Phoebe and Her Unicorn in The Magic Storm is the first standalone graphic novel. Phoebe is an average girl who befriends a unicorn, Marigold Heavenly Nostrils.  Together they tackle the mundane, school, to adventure, like when they solve mysteries as the […]

A truly awful book to blackout my bingo card!

Mary Bennet and the Bloomsbury Coven by Beth Deitchman

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So, this is another published Pride and Prejudice fanfiction.  I mean, so are all of them I suppose, but even the title screams “fanfic.”  And if I had come across this book with this description online, I would have passed it by.  But a hard copy was handed to me, and so I set out to read it.  So let’s journey together, shall we? *Note – will contain massive spoilers*   It’s bad.  Mary has taken to reading novels instead of more “serious” works, her […]

Impractical knowledge is still knowledge!

How To by Randall Monroe

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I need to stop having expectations for books.  I thought this was going to be more like his book What If? which had strange situations and then gave a scientific method of answering the question.  This is taking a theoretically normal problem, but then solving it (still scientifically) in the weirdest and most impractical way possible.     (The version I have is an ARC, and I’m reading it on my phone, so things don’t always line up correctly. Which isn’t great, but hey, I didn’t […]



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