Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time
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“Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown”

Paper Towns (2008) by John Green

July 11, 2022 by drmllz 2 Comments

When I was in high school at the turn of the century, while too young for bars and too old and cool for McDonalds, some friends and I would sit cross-legged on the platform between railway tracks at the train station of our town and play ‘pulse murder’. This was a game where you sat in a circle, and held hands, and one person was the murderer (I forget how they were assigned), and sent a number of squeezes, or pulses, around the circle. If […]

Filed Under: Young Adult Tagged With: after that summer nothing would ever be the same again, drmllz, john green, paper towns, Young Adult

drmllz's CBR14 Review No:5 · Genres: Young Adult · Tags: after that summer nothing would ever be the same again, drmllz, john green, paper towns, Young Adult ·
Rating:
· 2 Comments

‘Elizabeth X. I bet you have no other Xs in your file.’

The Secret of Elizabeth (1978) by Vera Caspary

May 2, 2022 by drmllz Leave a Comment

The Secret of Elizabeth is poised between Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). Like The Woman in White, whose author it specifically invokes, it’s told in fragments–diaries, letters, retrospective musings–and there’s a dash of Victorian melodrama to the plot, which features psychiatric institutions and purity fanatics, and a sort of quasi-Victorian concern with sexual morality. Like Gone Girl, there’s a woman who causes trouble both when she turns up and when she disappears (we find out about events […]

Filed Under: Mystery Tagged With: domestic suspense, drmllz, Vera Caspary

drmllz's CBR14 Review No:4 · Genres: Mystery · Tags: domestic suspense, drmllz, Vera Caspary ·
Rating:
· 0 Comments

‘She’s very good at stalling. Masterfully manipulative’

My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress (2022) by Rachel DeLoache Williams

April 4, 2022 by drmllz Leave a Comment

Note: Contains spoilers for Inventing Anna (2022) and My Friend Anna (2019, 2022) If you’ve watched Inventing Anna (2022) on Netflix, you know who Rachel is–the young woman who starts off optimistic and well-meaning, excited about her new friendship with Anna Delvey (and the luxe life that comes with her), and ends up anxious, then frantic, then an embittered nervous wreck, on the verge of losing her job at Vanity Fair. As opposed to the steely and poised Anna, whose tears and passion are carefully […]

Filed Under: Biography/Memoir, Non-Fiction Tagged With: #memoir, cbr14, drmllz, My Friend Anna, Netflix, non fiction, Rachel DeLoache Williams

drmllz's CBR14 Review No:3 · Genres: Biography/Memoir, Non-Fiction · Tags: #memoir, cbr14, drmllz, My Friend Anna, Netflix, non fiction, Rachel DeLoache Williams ·
Rating:
· 0 Comments

If Jane was vain, and Rochester was…sort of the same

Dragonwyck (1945) by Anya Seton

February 20, 2022 by drmllz 1 Comment

A Gothic scholar I follow on Twitter mentioned Dragonwyck quite recently, which recalled giddy memories of swooning at the suspense and romance and delicious clothes as an early teenager, probably too young to be reading about abusive relationships shrouded (at least initially) in glamour. But then again, I read Jane Eyre then too. So I ordered cheap secondhand paperback off Awesomebooks, and read it in a night. Miranda is a pretty farm girl with aristocratic aspirations, in Connecticut in the 1840s. A distant cousin, Nicholas Van […]

Filed Under: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense Tagged With: american gothic tales, anya seton, cbr14, Dragonwyck, drmllz, gothic historical romance

drmllz's CBR14 Review No:2 · Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense · Tags: american gothic tales, anya seton, cbr14, Dragonwyck, drmllz, gothic historical romance ·
Rating:
· 1 Comment

Ducks and biscuits and footnotes and fireworks

How to Be Brave by Daisy May Johnson

February 12, 2022 by drmllz 2 Comments

A number of classic children’s stories start with death or dislocation: Anne leaves her orphanage for Green Gables, Mary crosses the ocean to arrive at Misselthwaite Manor and discover the Secret Garden, Papa Alcott is absent at the Civil War front, leaving his Little Women to fend for themselves–and, in a more explicit early twentieth-century influence of Johnson’s, the orphan and impoverished Bettany sisters head to the Austrian Alps to start the Chalet School. The disruption of normal life, and a stable family unit, is […]

Filed Under: Children's Books, Comedy/Humor, Fiction, Mystery, Young Adult Tagged With: cbr14, Daisy May Johnson, drmllz, How to Be Brave, school story

drmllz's CBR14 Review No:1 · Genres: Children's Books, Comedy/Humor, Fiction, Mystery, Young Adult · Tags: cbr14, Daisy May Johnson, drmllz, How to Be Brave, school story ·
Rating:
· 2 Comments
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