Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

a #cannonbookclub favorite RETURNS!

It All Comes Back to You by Farah Naz Rishi

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Last year, during our The Future is Queer book club event, we were introduced to the sweet and complicated world of Farah Naz Rishi with her debut novel, I Hope You Get This Message. She returns next week with a decidedly different but still warmly familiar follow up: It All Comes Back to You. IHYGTM sits firmly on the edge of an apocalypse; aliens have made contact with Earth and time is quickly slipping away. It All Comes Back to You is firmly planted in another […]

Waiting for the end of the world

I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi

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Official book description: Seven days. Seven days. The Earth might end in seven days.   When news stations start reporting that Earth has been contacted by a planet named Alma, the world is abuzz with rumors that the alien entity is giving mankind only few days to live before they hit the kill switch on civilization.   For high school truant Jesse Hewitt, though, nothing has ever felt permanent. Not the guys he hooks up with. Not the jobs his underpaid mom works so hard […]

“I don’t want you to keep downplaying the hurt you feel like you’re not even human. You keep it up – all these lies to yourself, to other people, and soon you’re not going to know who you are.” (CBR12 Bingo)

I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi

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My Cannonball Bingo tradition is to sit down with the square descriptions and game plan out options for what books to read for each category. I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi could qualify for several squares (this is her debut published October 2019, we read it for CBR Book Club) but I’m using it for UnCannon. The ‘Canon’ is often made up of books written by old, white men and the goal of this square is to read as far from […]

Book Club Discussion: The Future is Queer!

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The time has arrived, I’ve been looking forward to The Future is Queer book club since we hatched the idea late last year. What better way to celebrate Pride than to focus on some speculative fiction by and about LGBTQ folks. Whether you read one or all four of our options, I hope you find something below that sparks your interest so we can continue to enjoy talking about books together. On to the boilerplate: ground rules remain the same as they always have. For […]

The Aliens are Just a Catalyst for These Deeply Human Journeys

I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi

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Number 2 of my reads for the #CannonBookClub this June, and it’s a bit of a different tone from my previous read of The Disasters, but I have really enjoyed both so far! I Hope You Get This Message begins after earth unscrambles a message from an alien planet, stating that they will be deliberating whether or not to terminate earth within 1 week. While most of the world scrambles to bunker down or descends into chaos, this novel focuses on  three teenagers each with […]

Being a teenager is hard enough without the threat of total annihilation looming on the horizon.

I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi

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Jesse, Cate, and Adeem are all just trying to survive- even before they catch wind of an alien planet’s message to earth: you will all be destroyed in seven days. Our main trio holds a treasure trove of teen torments between them: absent parents, the desire to be loved, the inability to accept care, the need to be anywhere other than where they are. Everyone is attempting to find someone who does not necessarily want to be found, and I was worried that we’d being […]



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