Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.”

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

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This book chewed me up and spit me back out. In a good way, of course. But seriously, I had a major book hangover after finishing this one. The writing, the story, the characters were all so, so beautiful. I started sobbing after it was over because I was so overwhelmed with how lovely what I just read was. The story follows Cyril Avery’s life, born in the 1940s, all the way up until present day. His mother was cruelly kicked out of her rural […]

“If you can’t win the game, you have to cheat.”

The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Lee, Mackenzi

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Have you read Mackenzi Lee’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue? If not, stop reading this review and go read that.  This is the sequel, and both books are utterly delightful and disarming. This book is the second in The Montague Siblings series (or duology? there are only two of them) and the story belongs to Felicity, the more sensible and academic of the two.  Gentleman’s Guide made it clear that Felicity has more interest in science and medicine than domesticity and society and in her […]

Standalone fantasy novels are rare and precious. This one was not bad.

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Khai was destined from birth to become the Shadow of the Sun-blessed princess Zaryia. Both born during the same eclipse, Khai was the child who caught the hawk’s feather thrown by the selected priestess, thus confirming that he was the chosen one. Raised by warrior priests deep in the desert, Khai is trained in all the deadly arts of stealth and fighting, and gets his first chance to kill a man at age nine. He hones all his abilities to become the very best Shadow […]

Hold On To Your Hats, Turns Out I’m Mad

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To say that this book is inelegant with the subjects it attempts to deal with is putting it kindly: this novel is obnoxious and gross. I don’t even remember how I first became aware of it, but I remember reading a synopsis and thinking, “that can’t be right?” I was baffled as to how it would work, and thought I certainly wouldn’t like it. But curiosity got the best of me (oh, also the author stating that people should read it before criticizing it, due […]

I gave up

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You know, when I signed up for Cannonball Read last December I had every plan of finally reading some of the reputably excellent books that are sitting in my library just waiting for me to finally read them. I also was planning to read some academic book that I should have read like five years ago (yes , I am looking at you Marshall McLuhan) and some really wonderful comics book I’ve bought over the years and have yet to read. Instead I am mostly […]

Surprisingly, This is Not for the “Book is Better” Square

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Bingo Square: Home, Something, Home I started watching the movie adaptation of this on a recent plane trip, and only realized once I was further into it, that Love, Simon was based on the novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, an often reviewed novel on Cannonball Read. My main motivation for starting the movie is that I quite liked the lead actor in Everything, Everything (I like that both the lead actors in that movie are basically working their way through YA film adaptions […]



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