Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

State Sponsored Horror

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez

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I’m not a short story guy. I like a long, dense tale I can sink my teeth into. And there are so many Latin American writers who have penned beauties in that regard. Bolano, Marquez, Gamboa just to name a few. Mariana Enríquez is known for her short fiction collections. I haven’t read them. But in reading the first fifth of this one, I can see why she is so acclaimed. The first part of this book is one of the more visually arresting tales […]

A kid asked me to do define communism. Um…

Red Scare by Liam Francis Walsh

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Fear of communism is rampant in America, but at the moment, Peggy is more concerned with her ongoing complications from polio, her parent’s struggling marriage, and oh yeah: witnessing the murder of a mysterious man the feds are calling a Russian spy. The spy was carrying a glowing red rod, and before he died, he hid the item in one of Peggy’s crutches. Not only does Peggy find herself hiding a mysterious Russian artifact, but that artifact enables her to fly! Suddenly, her health woes […]

“Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.”

James by Percival Everett

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I heard from multiple people that James was THE BOOK to read last year, and it was on a lot of best of lists, so I was exicted to give it a read. It fully hooked me from the first sentence “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” I didn’t have a lot of expectations about this book, but having me chuckle from the start was a surprise. This is a retelling of the classic tale Huck Finn but from the […]

Have you ever met a rich man somebody didn’t want to kill?

Hither, Page: Page and Sommers Book #1 by Cat Sebastian

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Probably he had the honest man’s instinctive distaste for subverting the course of justice. That was a luxury Leo never had. If only honest men knew how many lives had been saved with a bit of criminal conspiracy, they’d think it one of the cardinal virtues. ― Cat Sebastian, Hither, Page Leo Page and James Sommers end up in the same small English village in the years following WWII. James is a physician and he returned to the small village where he lived with his […]

Three and a half Golden Pippins!

At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier

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Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of my favourite historical novels, it’s extremely well researched and although it’s completely fictional, it could very plausibly have happened as told. Remarkable Creatures falls into the same category, I loved it as well, so I was ready to read/listen to another novel by Tracy Chevalier and see what world she would bring to life this time. In At the Edge of the Orchard, the historical background is the colonization of the American West, the Gold Rush, and […]

Jukebox TARDIS

Jukebox by Nidhi Chanani

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Shaheen is a tween whose father is super into old music, and boy does he love to talk about it. He never talks about anything else. Shaheen explodes at him one day in an innocent fight, but then her father goes missing. The last place he was seen was at his favorite old record store. Shaheen and her cousin Tannez go investigate, and discover a unique jukebox in the attic of the abandoned store. They put a record on to play, a Bessie Smith album. […]



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