Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A master distills fantasy down to its essence

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

The Owl Service by Alan Garner

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

The Moon of Gomrath by Alan Garner

Boneland by Alan Garner

by Leave a Comment

Bingo (In order):  Guide, Relationships, Nostalgia, Europe, Adulthood Passport: England When Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize I was surprised, not because I don’t think he’s a brilliant writer worthy of a major literary award, but because awards like this don’t seem to take fantasy seriously, despite the depth of the ideas and the beauty of the prose, and I hadn’t realised that this author I loved in my childhood was still alive and still writing.  Treacle Walker is not […]

On the road to nowhere

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

by 2 Comments

Bingo: On the Road; Passport: USA Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland documents several years of immersion into the subculture of vandwellers, people who call themselves houseless rather than homeless, living in their vehicles and moving between seasonal jobs such as camp hosting in national parks, Amazon’s Camperforce, and harvesting crops.  The narrative follows a number of members and leaders of the vandweller community, but the focus character is Linda May who lives  with her dog Coco in a 1974 ten-foot trailer towed behind a Jeep. Like most […]

CBR15 Bingo: Picture This

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kokabe

by 1 Comment

CBR15 Bingo: Picture This (can also be used for Queer Lives) Official book description: In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to […]

“Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously”

Sawkill Girls (2018) by Claire Legrand

by Leave a Comment

I find it hard to write or think about YA fiction without thinking about Taylor Swift sometimes–in this particular case, ‘Seven’ from Folklore (2020): “Please picture me in the weeds / Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously /Any time I wanted.” Sawkill Girls is a scream of a book beneath its veneer of preppy popularity politics and teenage drama and desire: a scream of fear and despair and fury, a loud barbaric yawp against vanishing and silencing, a howl against monsters and the different […]

“Oh wretched little one—just like evildoers, the wretched don’t die easy.”

Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

by Leave a Comment

From the very first page: “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had been thrown into their midst. It all started with a noise coming from an old gravesite with an unmarked tombstone covered in knee-high grass, but […]

And it stuns me silent, for a moment: just how vast the gap is between who I am and how people see me.

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

by Leave a Comment

CBR15 BINGO: (Hold Steady Square: The main character here desperately tries to hold steady. She is terrible at it.) This is a little like Daisy Jones and the Six but with tennis, and I’m not mad about it. Not trying to diminish Jenkins Reid’s writing here at all. She has a lane and she is staying in it: complex female characters who are unapologetically who they are. Can they learn from their mistakes? Sure. Can they open up a little and let people in? They can. What they […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo