Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Eliza Has Monsters

Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

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Eliza has external and internal monsters. She has the external high school kind of monsters who like to pick on and reject anyone who seems different. She has the internal monsters of anxiety and insecurity. And of course, she has the monsters that she has created for her webcomic. Eliza is the creator of a highly popular webcomic called Monstrous Sea. She publishes under a pseudonym, and very few people in her life know that she and her nom de plume LadyConstellation are the same person. […]

Books about fandom, one of my many kryptonites

Eliza and her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

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Content warning: suicide (past), suicidal ideation Hmm I think I’m forever chasing books about fandom to find that mythical “character like myself” who will make me feel seen the way that others have felt seen by Spoiler Alert or Geekerella. And while I’m very glad that people are feeling seen by this book, I have to firmly shelve it under “High School, I’m Glad This Wasn’t My.” As I noted when I started reading this, I got very much more into Monstrous Sea than I did in the story of […]

There are monsters in the sea

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I was going to start this review the way I normally do, with a few paragraphs trying to sum up the story of the book. But having written nearly two whole paragraphs, I went back and deleted them, because I don’t really want to say too much about the plot of the book. I didn’t know a whole lot going into the book, and I think my reading experience was better for it. Very short summary: Eliza Mirk is a teenager soon to graduate high […]

There’s a Monster at the End of This Book

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Life is a balancing act.  We have to balance what we want to do with what we have to do. We have to balance our comfort with our risks.  Eliza Mirk has lived a mostly anonymous online life where she has created one of the most popular stories on the Internet.  Written and drawn in installments, Monstrous Sea pretty much consumes Eliza’s life.  When she is first introduced to a new student named Wallace, she thinks he’s just another jock who will make fun of her, […]

“Broken people don’t hide from their monsters. Broken people let themselves be eaten…”

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I was a big fan of Francesca Zappia’s Made You Up, and was excited for her follow up, Eliza and Her Monsters. The book did not disappoint. It’s about Eliza, who is a loner misfit at school but secretly the mastermind behind Monstrous Sea, a phenomenally popular web comic. The trouble starts when she befriends the new boy at school, Wallace. He’s a very active member of her fandom. The closer that they get, the worse it will be when he finds out who she […]

Pssst, Cannonballers. Read this book, I think you will like it a lot.

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“If you want the motivation back, you must feed it. Feed it everything. Books, television, movies, paintings, stage plays, real-life experience. Sometimes feeding simply means working, working through nonmotivation, working even when you hate it. We create art for many reasons—wealth, fame, love, admiration—but I find the one thing that produces the best results is desire. When you want the thing you’re creating, the beauty of it will shine through, even if the details aren’t all in order. Desire is the fuel of creators, and […]



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