Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Summer of 1999

Home is Where The Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose (Author), January LaVoy (Narrator), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator), Brittany Pressley (Narrator), Andrew Eiden (Narrator)

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We sometimes (sort of jokingly but also sort of not) say in my immediate family that we only get together with the extended family when there is a wedding or when there is a funeral.  Big life events bring people together, and it is the passing of their mother (Laura) that brings the siblings in this novel back into each other’s orbits.  And once they are back in each other’s lives, old tensions start to rise, exacerbated by the little fact that, oh yeah, their […]

“He withdrew the knife slowly, as if fearful of causing Marian Savage pain.”

The Elementals by Michael McDowell

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This is another Valancourt reissue Christmas gift to me and has a pull quote from Stephen King on the cover, which made me interested to read it. Poppy Z. Brite says on the back of the book that this is “surely one of the most terrifying novels ever written,” so I was ready to be scared. However, I didn’t honestly find it that scary and I felt like the racial politics distracted me from fully feeling immersed in the text. The Elementals is a Southern […]

Twistin the Night Away

The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly

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Last night, I woke up at 3:30 with a warm flush (being a middle aged woman is aces, y’all) and as I was fanning myself on the sofa, I grabbed my book for the usual 20 minutes or so until my temperature made sense again. I’d been reading this for a couple of days, and I was liking it but I didn’t think it’s be a problem to set it back down and so I could finish getting my night’s sleep. Reader, I’m sure you […]

Breuckelen

Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson

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I rarely read the afterward in an author’s book. Usually it’s because I’m too excited to get started on the next book to really care. But I enjoyed Pineapple Street so much, I raced to the afterward because I wanted to see what inspired her to write the book. Reading it amused me because I think the book she produced was one her brain wrote as opposed to the one her heart thought she was writing. And that’s perfectly fine. According to Jackson, she was inspired by […]

“It’s true on a technicality. I’m being held unlawfully. I didn’t commit the crime for which I’ve been convicted. But if you look at it another way, I deserve to be here. I did a lot of other shitty things, for which I wasn’t punished.”

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

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I wish I would have known this was a retelling of The Brothers Karamazov before I purchased this book and got all excited about it. I probably never would have picked it up. There is a reason that I have never read any of Dostoyevsky’s stuff (or Tolstoy for that matter). The Family Chao follows the titular family, owners of a Chinese restaurant in a small town in America. The parents of the family are immigrants from China, and there are three sons. When the […]

A Terribly Sad Book That Probably Shouldn’t Have Been Written at This Point in Time

Spare by Prince Harry

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Honestly, where to begin with this one considering the amount of ink already spilled about it and the endless interviews. I am coming at this from the point of view of someone most interested in pre-WWI royalty, and as someone who is interested in the generational reverberations of child abuse. I am not that invested in who is right in the current generational struggle or really in any of the individuals in this book, and I tried to approach my reading with a fairly open […]



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