Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

All the world’s a stage

The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn

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The Whalebone Theatre is a coming of age novel set in the decades before and during WWII. The main focus is on the three Seagrave half siblings, especially the eldest Cristabel Seagrave. More than a “growing up and learning” kind of story though, The Whalebone Theatre is about misfits and about the saving grace of art. Cristabel Seagrave was born to lead but finds herself often frustrated. The Seagraves are a propertied family with a seaside estate called Chilcombe, but of course, women don’t take […]

“Rows of houses all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me”

The Hours Before Dawn (1958) by Celia Fremlin

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In the autumn of 2011, I played Bella Manningham in an amateur dramatic production of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller Gas Light, which has given its name to the practice of deliberately undermining someone’s conception of their own sanity for selfish or sinister purposes. Bella is the wife who sees lights flicker, whose things won’t stay where she left them, who is increasingly convinced that she is disappearing deeper and deeper into her own mad mind.  “You mustn’t go on lying here in the dark, or […]

The brain can go wrong in some crazy ways

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

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CBR15 BINGO: Strange Worlds, because these essays take you into the very strange world of the mind BINGO: Strange Worlds, Queer Lives, You Are Here, Asia & Oceania, Picture This When I studied abnormal psychology in college, my favorite parts of the textbook were those little side-blurbs that described specific cases of people afflicted with weird brain conditions. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat reads a lot like those side blurbs. In this book, neurologist Oliver Sacks (of Awakenings fame), describes 24 […]

A lovely return to Wedgeford

The Marquis Who Mustn't by Courtney Milan

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This is an ARC I received from the author. My opinions are not influenced by my free copy. I have also already pre-ordered the book. Official book description: Miss Naomi Kwan has long wanted to take ambulance classes so that she can save lives. But when she tries to register, she’s told she needs permission from the man in charge of her. It would be incredibly wrong to claim that the tall, taciturn Chinese nobleman she just met is her fiancé, but Naomi is desperate, […]

Who wanted this banned and why?

Class Act by Jerry Craft

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Drew Ellis goes to the prestigious Riverdale Academy Day School, but unlike a lot of his more privileged classmates, he feels like he has to work way harder and he still might not get the same opportunities that they do. While a lot of his fellow students live in enormous mansions, Drew lives alone with his grandmother (who has to work almost constantly to provide for him). He also knows that no matter how good his grades are or which school he attends, most people […]

A dark and brooding novel

His Bloody Project - Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae: A Historical Thriller by Graeme Macrae Burnet

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Cbr15bingo Getaway (for You Are Here), bingo His Bloody Project, a Man Booker Prize finalist from 2016, is a novel that imagines a case of murder in which the question is: was the murderer insane? The action is set in a remote village of coastal Scotland in 1869, and author Graeme Macrae Burnet immerses his readers in a rough, rural environment where opportunities for success are few and being able to get on with the neighbors is vital. The structure of this novel is ingenious: […]



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