Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

But how we are remembered is less important than what we do now.

Lore by Alexandra Bracken

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CBR13 BINGO: Mythic Square BINGO! (Book Club Square to Free Square diagonal) I was looking for something to tick the “Mythic” square off my CBR Bingo card and wanted something that was heavy on the re-telling and light on requiring PhD level knowledge of Greek mythology in order to “get it.” This fit the bill but I think if I had a better memory for the mythology class I took 100 years ago in college it would have been helpful. This a YA mythic send […]

Things are not always what they seem (Double Bingo)

The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

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4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Landscape Costis is one of the Attolian guards, fiercely loyal to his beloved (if fearsome) queen and skeptical and disdainful of his so-called king, the former Thief of Eddis, who through trickery and guile ended up married to their queen. Nevertheless, when he foolishly loses his temper and ends up striking the king in the face, he’s mortified and expects to be sent home in disgrace if he’s lucky, executed if he’s unlucky. Yet the strange, new young king surprises everyone, […]

For the night is dark, and full of terrors

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

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4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Shelfie In five creepy stories ranging from the historical to more recent times, writer and artist Emily Carroll gives us her take on proper spine-tingling fairy tales. Accompanied by her absolutely beautiful art, the tales are all the more chilling because of the illustrations. This absolutely qualifies as a graphic novel, or probably more accurately a graphic short story (or fairy tale) anthology. Some of the stories are short, some are longer, all managed to truly unnerve me, while also entertaining […]

I miss going on vacations

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

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3.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Travel Official book description: Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love. Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, […]

“My vagina is a crime scene”

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

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Bingo: Pandemic I’ve been reading a lot of books this year that focus on women’s experiences – how they relate to themselves, to their partners, to their mothers. Burnt Sugar also falls into that category, as it tells the story of Antara, an Indian woman dealing with her mother’s descent into dementia, while at the same time reckoning with her dissatisfaction with how her life has turned out, and exploring her traumatic childhood. I made the mistake of reading a couple of Goodreads reviews after I […]

“History, rolled, reshaped, undone and mauled”

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

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CBRBingo: Uncannon (And card full!) Carpentaria is a powerful novel by Waanyi woman, Alexis Wright, set in the fictional town of Desperance on Australia’s remote tropical Gulf of Carpentaria.  It’s a challenging read, with densely beautiful passages of description and distant omniscient narrative that takes sudden dives down into the dirt of this troubled town and its messy inhabitants.  It took me a while to find its rhythm, but then I was hooked. This is a story about a family.  Norm Phantom, who “the Pricklebush […]



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