Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Her House is a Very Crazy (and loving) house

The Apartment House on Poppy Hill V01 by Nina LaCour

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The Apartment House on Poppy Hill V01 by Nina LaCour is part Part Pippi Longstocking and part Mary Poppins. It is about a young girl, Ella, who knows everything there is about the apartments in her house on the hill. Like it is not on the top or the bottom of the hill, but in the middle. She knows the strict rules for the garden. How to park on the hill (even though she is only nine). And that the house has five apartments, A […]

An adult story with some triggers

Yerba Buena: A Novel by Nina LaCour

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Cbr15bingo Queer Lives, bingo Yerba Buena is a beautifully written and conceived novel about love and loss. Its two main characters, Sara and Emilie, have experienced trauma and tragedy at a young age. As adults, they are each trying to find their place in the world and perhaps find love with each other, but they still struggle with the ghosts of their pasts.  Sara and Emilie grew up in very different environments but share similar problems. Emilie’s family’s Creole roots are in New Orleans, but […]

Playing Catchup

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Night Train by David Quantick

The Lost Village by Camilla Sten

Watch Over Me by Nina LaCour

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman

Imposter Syndrome by Kathy Wang

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Listen, sometimes you graduate from college, panic about your future, land a job, and move to a new city and even though you’re reading a couple books a month you forget about the whole reviewing part. I’ve still got 6 more reviews to write from May-September reads, but here are a few from May and October. (I wrote half of the May ones in May so they might be a little outdated. A group of housewives in a suburb of Charleston, SC in the 90s […]

“I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.”

We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

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I struggled with this book for quite a while. For reasons I now don’t remember I believed this book to be a graphic novel and had filed it as such as a different task for Read Harder challenge than I eventually recorded it under. Then, once I began reading it for what it truly was, I found myself struggling through the chapters. Marin the protagonist is in such a low place, and Nina LaCour writes it so well that I felt myself being pulled under […]

A Moving Look at Grief, Love, and Friendship

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We Are Okay by Nina LaCour My rating: 5 of 5 stars “We Are Okay” explores grief, discovering a dark secret about someone, and transitions in life. Heavy stuff. In fact, I was worried I would hate this book because I tend to read for entertainment not to be confronted with topics such as these. However, Nina LaCour weaves characters, emotions, and a mysterious plot into a very good read. The book is organized in which we start in the present and then flashback to […]

Thank you, Julie Murphy, for continuously not sucking.

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I’m sorry to say that Meet Cute was my biggest reading disappointment of 2018 so far. It had everything I thought I wanted: how-we-met short stories from some of the best YA authors out there — including Julie freaking Murphy — and a recommendation from Rainbow Rowell. I assumed it would be a delight. And some of it was. I had never heard of Ibi Zoboi, but her story “Hourglass” was my favorite of the bunch. She told a story about Cherish, a tall African-American […]



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