Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

CBR15 Bingo: Hold Steady (my first actual Bingo!)

Never Been Kissed by Timothy Janovski

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CBR15 Bingo: Hold Steady (Wren is in quite a rut at the start of the book) Official book description: Wren Roland has never been kissed, but he wants that movie-perfect ending more than anything. Feeling nostalgic on the eve of his birthday, he sends emails to all the boys he (ahem) loved before he came out. Morning brings the inevitable Oh God What Did I Do?, but he brushes that panic aside. Why stress about it? None of his could-have-beens are actually going to read […]

CBR15 Bingo-Week 9 Check-in

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Welcome to the Week 9 wrap-up! In sad news, singer, songwriter, and author Jimmy Buffett passed away yesterday. He once said that reading was his default activity, but I can’t find that clip, so here is Jean-Luc Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) instead. You can view the kick-off post with the categories, rules and card here. The Players: ardaigle – 7 reviews BlackRaven – 25 reviews, BLACKOUT carmelpie – 19 reviews, 4 Bingos Carriejay – 9 reviews CoffeeShopReader – 14 reviews Debcapsfan – 3 reviews Dome’Loki – 3 […]

Mary Sue, the bee

The Bees by Laline Paull

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Bingo: Sex;  Passport: Allegory I guess I was prejudiced against this book from the start.  This year, my home book club is reading a different genre each month and this was the group choice for “fantasy”.  While some reviews compared it to The Hunger Games, or The Handmaid’s Tale, I thought it was telling that its award nominations were for “women’s fiction” and not fantasy.  I can see why this book was well received.  Life in a beehive is an unusual premise for a novel, […]

“Just because you don’t experience prejudice in your everyday doesn’t stop it existing for the rest of us.”

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T J Klune

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Bingo: Queer Lives;  Passport: Sweet weird It’s no spoiler to say that it was obvious how this book was going to end right from the start, or at least from the moment in protagonist Linus Barker’s train journey when “the gray darkness gave way to a bright and wonderful blue like Linus had never seen before”. Linus is a caseworker in the drab and regimented Department in Charge of Magical Youth, an inspector of orphanages for children gifted, or afflicted, with traits of myth and […]

A multi-generational exploration of Black experience from the early days of the slave trade through modern day.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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CBR 15 Bingo: Africa – The book begins, ends, and half of it takes place in Africa. Yaa Gyasi begins Homegoing with a pair of sisters (Effia Otcher and Esi Asare) separated at birth at the height of the African slave trade.  One sister, Effia, is raised and married off to a white Englishman on the Gold Coast.  The other sister, Esi, stays in a tribal African village.  The story covers seven generations. Each chapter is a new person advancing down the timeline and alternates between […]

Ah, to be young and have much money…

And I'd Do it Again by Aimee Crocker

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CBR 15 Bingo – Asia/Oceania: Aimee was fascinated by the people and cultures of Asia from when she was young, and the majority of the adventures she recounts take place in various countries there. Edwardian heiress Aimee Crocker, after the failure of her first marriage, sets off multiple years-long journeys around the world for the sheer joy of it, picking up along the way many lovers, children, pearls and snakes. I had never heard of Aimee Crocker until I read 19th Century Female Explorers and had […]



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