Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“So she’s a mystic autistic?”

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan

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That title is the question my fiancee posed to me when I ranted to her about this book. Honestly, I’d say she’s not necessarily wrong. Although Willow is never confirmed to be autistic, probably in large part due to her family situation being so everchanging and her school counselor being an abject failure, she clearly is, and the book seems to just be her, through some voodoo magic, causing drastic shifts in the lives of everybody she comes into contact with. Like she just exists […]

The pandemic perfectly realized as prose

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

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Somehow I’ve lasted this long (32 years) without having read a Jodi Picoult novel. I recognize the name, having heard it spoken so highly of throughout the years, but couldn’t place it to a single book. Looking at her bibliography, only My Sister’s Keeper pops for me as a recognizable name. But I saw this one at Target, was hooked by the opening lines describing Diana watching her father restore the zodiac ceiling in the main hall of Grand Central Terminal (“When I was six […]

That’s what friends are for…. (CBR12Bingo 2: Friendship)

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

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I always enjoy reading Jodi Picoult books while I’m reading them, but after I’ve had a chance to think about them, I start having reservations. Usually because she writes about hot topics that feel a bit sensationalized, or because she writes about realistic situations that always wrap up a little too neatly. Or because she writes characters rather than people, if that makes sense. So I think I liked this book more than her past novels because while the characters are very much Book Characters, […]

Suspiciously familiar

House Rules by Jodi Picoult

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I had this nagging sense of deja vu reading this book and couldn’t quite figure out why. I assumed it was that Jodi Picoult has a fairly consistent style, and frankly all of her books kind of remind me of a TV movie version of whatever subject she writes on, but that was only part of it. (So many of her books have a single woman who is romanced by a male character who is clearly just in the book to be her love interest […]

Just because it’s good doesn’t mean I’m keeping it.

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

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This is the best book I’ve thrown in the resale pile so far. It was good. Very good. So good I debated keeping it. But this is definitely in the “glad I read this once, never putting myself through it again” pile. Sage, our imperfect protagonist of the frame tale, is a reclusive baker who befriends an old man in the grief support group she attends to deal with the loss of her mother. A car accident three years prior has left Sage permanently scarred […]

Throw the whole damn man away

Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult

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I have to admit some bias with this book, because a good friend of mine who is wayyyy too amazing to date the Jaydens, Braydens, and Okaydens that she usually goes for just got her heart broken by the most average basic cis dude doctor.  But even so, throw the whole damn man away Paige. Our heroine is not perfect, mind. She leaves her husband and three month old to go find herself by searching for her wayward mother for a few months. Because she’s […]



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