Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

‘No airport was an island either.’

Airport by Arthur Hailey

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CBR 15 Bingo – Nostalgia: This book is set in the glamorous heyday of air travel (and as I am currently in hour three of a ten hour layover in Munich, I can assure you I am feeling very nostalgic.) Over the course of seven hours, Lincoln Airport must go through a snowstorm, a protest, and the return of an airplane that’s had a hole blasted in its side. I love stories about airports and airplanes. They’re exciting to me because they are emblematic of adventure – […]

Heartbreakers

Stone Cold Fox by Rachel Koller Croft

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But Sigourney Weaver is a murderous narcissist and Jennifer Love Hewitt loves her, hates her, and is terrified by her. Just like the classic 2001 film! Beautiful, accomplished Bea is about to marry the extremely rich man of her dreams and disappear into a life of peaceful domesticity. Her only problem is winning over his protective family who think she’s a gold digger along with everyone else in his upper class social circle who are determined to keep her out. And then there’s the best […]

What’s in a name?

The Swifts A Dictionary of Scoundrels by Beth Lincoln

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Cbr15bingo Dwelling, illustrations by Claire Powell This is a really fun work of kids lit (ages 8-12) that involves a murder mystery set in a very old ancestral home. Swift manor is a house full of secret passages and rooms, a place that has evolved over time along with the highly unusual Swift family. Each member of the family, at birth, is given a name chosen at random from the family Dictionary. Names seem to turn out to be strangely fitting for each member; is […]

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

Sawkill Girls (2018) by Claire Legrand

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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

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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 […]

It’s Always Those People

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

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“The Netanyahus,” is a fictionalized version of a real-life visit to an American campus by the father of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The subtitle: “An account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family” is a succinct but entirely inadequate description.   The book is also about being part of the Jewish diaspora in America in the 50s and being Jewish anywhere throughout history. It’s also about Israel. The book is so readable primarily because it […]



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