Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This book was supposed to help with my anxiety – not exacerbate it

Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig

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Watch me use my exceptional capacity of being a slacker to my own advantage when I profit off my backlog of 10+ unreviewed books to tick boxes off the CBR Bingo card like it’s nobody’s business. This was not planned, by the way – I’m just a slacker by nature. And to be honest, this is actually very much in line with the theme for this particular book, which is supposed to be all about managing anxiety. For those of you who don’t know Matt […]

Ranging from Excellent to Mediocre

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

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None of these books fit into my reviewing theme this year (revisiting series I’d never finished), but I wanted to review Clap When You Land anyway because it is excellent, and I decided to throw the other three in as a bonus. Clap When You Land: 5 stars. Plot: Camino lives in the Dominican Republic with her Tia and sees her father every summer, when he comes back from New York City to visit. When his plan tragically crashes and everyone aboard dies, she discovers […]

The Midnight Library: Surprisingly uplifting

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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The Midnight Library follows a woman name Nora Seed who has a pretty sad life: dead end job, bad apartment, dead cat, no friends, dead mom. So she decides to take her own life by overdosing. After laying down to die, she finds herself in this kind of interstitial space of a weirdly magical library with infinite books of all the infinite lives she could have lived. The librarian is a woman from her past, Mrs. Elm, who helped her through her father’s death. Mrs. […]

I like the idea that Life potentially starts in every moment, but the execution was just okay

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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I wish I had written this review closer to when I actually finished the audiobook, but I wasn’t too anxious to review this one since it’s not as stellar as other books I’ve read this year so far. Checking out The Midnight Library was a direct result of cannonball reviews, both good and bad, and a certain curiosity about how I would fare with the story. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Matt Haig’s, The Midnight Library, is about a woman who […]

It’s a Wonderful Life (Now With Books!)

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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CW: suicide, suicidal ideation This was an interesting premise but has some deep (spoiler-y) flaws in the magical element that make it hard to get behind it from an entirely logical perspective. The not-spoiler part (available as part of book’s blurb): sometimes, instead of dying, you end up in a midway point which, for our protagonist, takes the form of an endless library in which it is always midnight and which is librarian’d by her old middle school librarian. You can read any of the […]

This one needed a content warning

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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This book was a pretty simple, two-day read, a spin on an “It’s a Wonderful Life”-type story that lost a lot of credit with me because it needs a SERIOUS content warning on the cover. The whole cover spiel is “between life and death there is a library” which, cool, but we get there because our narrator wants to die. The first ten percent of this book is focused on the mindset of a woman who sees death as her only option. We need a […]



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