Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This book has reached its expiration so I have taken it off my shelves.

The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1) by Patrick Ness

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Not for me, I’m sure it was great. (Or was it???) I might have liked this if it was still 2009. It seriously felt like time-traveling back to when I thought I liked dystopias, and when they were everywhere. Also, I just don’t think this author is for me. I read another book from him a couple years ago and also didn’t care about it very much. This is a YA sci-fi/dystopia about a boy and his dog who live in a place where there […]

Who is in charge of picking books that become movies?

The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness

Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness

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Seriously, who is in charge? I could say from a mile away this series would NOT make a good movie. But it did make a really good book series. I found myself emotionally involved and invested in the first book and in love with the second. The third was a bit of a let down personally but the conclusion and characters were still strong. Quick plot summary: Todd is a boy aging into manhood on a planet with a lack of women. The men of […]

When favorite authors disappoint you, pt 2: disappoint harder

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

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In my second review for CBR13, I wrote about how disappointing it is when one of your favorite authors writes a book that you just do not like. I don’t know if this is some kind of cannonball curse, but with book 6 of this challenge, it has happened to me again. I used to be a huge YA fan, and the first book in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy still ranks as one of my favorites. His short novel A Monster Calls is amazing too […]

The Monster of Grief

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

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It took me three-quarters of the way through A Monster Calls before I began to appreciate it. Throughout much of the book I was repelled by the protagonist’s unlikability, and his bottomless anger at everything and everyone in his life. But then my view changed. The main character is a boy named Conor. His mother is sick with cancer, he rarely sees his father who lives in another country, and his mother’s mother is cold to him. Conor is plagued by an unspeakable dream every […]

This was fine, but the satire didn’t really resonate for me.

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

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Everybody raves about Patrick Ness, but this is my first experience with his books. He seems like a talented writer. His prose was well-executed. He knows his way around story and character arcs. And he seems very imaginative and inventive. I even read this book pretty fast, and while reading, I wasn’t ever wishing I was reading something else. But . . . I just didn’t click with it. And the parts I did click with were sort of undercut by the ending. It was […]

It’s a Perfectly Fine Book

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

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I don’t have a lot to say about this one. I wanted to like it more than I did. That said, it wasn’t a bad book. It was just . . . fine. I enjoyed reading it, it kept my attention, and it’s a quick read that I finished in about a day. I would recommend it, I don’t regret reading it (though I do regret buying it), and I can’t point to anything I disliked about it. But it was still just . . […]



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