Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Not pure fluff, but very, very good.

The Heart Principle (The Kiss Quotient, #3) by Helen Hoang

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I liked the first two books in this series, but this one is on another level. It’s very personal and you can tell, even before you get to the end and the author’s note where she straight out says that the book is half memoir. With this book, she was Working Through Some Shit. However, just because you write what you know as an author doesn’t mean that you will write something good or compelling, but Hoang has definitely managed to do that, and I […]

You don’t need a little orange book to be prepared for this book

Worst-Case Collin by Rebecca Caprara

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The prose poetry allows Worst-Case Collin by Rebecca Caprara to be a quick read, but without sacrificing the story. In the tone and style of Love that Dog and Hate that Cat, Caprara created a book that is both familiar in the subjects presented (growing up, bullies, the loss of a parent, friendship, mental health issues) and different (the father’s particular mental health issues). While I felt the ending was a bit forced, it also was the only way to do it. The realism of […]

“And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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In one word: Grieving Cannonball Read Bingo: Uncannon I picked this for uncannon because Gyasi is giving new life to a story that we’ve seen many times over from the Eurocentric white perspective. There have been plenty of books about drug addiction (even specifically about Oxycontin and the havoc it is wreaking in America), mental illness, the crossroads of science and religion in academia, and an overachieving character trying to fix her heart by using her head. She is taking very familiar tropes and given […]

This book is fudging (only I didn’t say fudge) messed up! But … I think I liked it

Psychotic by Jacques Mathis

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Psychotic by Jacques Mathis is a, “What the Flying Monkey did I just read,” read. With Sylvian Dorange illustrating this splintered, crazy, odd, all over the place graphic novel, Mathis tells his own story. It is a story of one man’s madness, and the journey he takes to try and put himself back together again. Yet, some days, if what we see on the page is the real type of things he experienced during his manic episodes, it is a miracle is did not stay […]

Love &…well, more love…

Love & Olives by Jenna Evans Welch

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“Do you think it’s possible that you can believe in me for a bit? How do you believe in someone who left when you were eight years old? And how was I supposed to manage the enormous chasm that existed between how he said he felt about me and what his actions said he felt about me?” Liv thought her biggest problem was trying to find a way to tell her boyfriend that she wants to attend art school rather than follow him to Stanford. […]

Self-Help 1, 2, 3!

The Journey from Abandonement to Healing by Susan Anderson

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD

Please Yourself by Emma Reed Turrell

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It’s time for the heavy-weight competitors of the Self-Help category! A team up of not two but three books that are written by highly regarded mental health professionals and containing a wealth of helpful and, in this combo, complimentary advice on how to get over your damn shit! Okay but seriously, the combo of these books and the order I read them in was really great, which is why I’m doing a triple review. The Journey from Abandonment to Healing: Surviving and recovering from the […]



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