Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

cbr12bingo – Orange

Sing to It by Amy Hempel

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“A woman of her word can do what she signed on to do.” If you need a quick but cathartic sob, this is the book for you. Clocking in at under 150 pages, Sing To It  houses a tiny and brutal collection of stories- some so tiny that they are just a few sentences long. Do not let the brevity fool you; even the most micro of the micro-fiction within will burn you. Several stories are still playing in my head days later. “Full-Service Shelter” is […]

“burn before reading”

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El -Mohtar & Max Gladstone

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If this is what the Time War feels like, then I volunteer as tribute. This two-hander from Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone burns bright right in the center of your chest and dares you to put it out. Red and Blue are operatives on either side of a war that has been going on since before time existed and well past the end of the universe. They are fierce and wild warriors; brilliant minds matched with brilliant and sharp teeth. They claw their way through […]

“Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master-something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.” – Charlotte Bronte

Heathcliff Redux: A Novella and Stories by Lily Tuck

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We have a Heathcliff problem. We fantasize on the regular about a brooding hulk smoldering just out of view. He’s there- he’s part of the nature of the area, and we are going to conquer that nature. We are going to nurture the brutish man. We are going to fix him, and he’s going to rescue us. Except, we know the truth. We are going to ruin ourselves trying to capture him, and it isn’t going to change him in the slightest. Our narrator in Heathcliff […]

“The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)”

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

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Ooof. This book is slight, but it packs a wallop. I felt like I was reading through someone’s diary. It was as if the diary was left open with a READ ME sign glowing in neon above, but it was still so personal that I had to keep sneaking furtive glances over my shoulder to make sure that the diary’s owner wouldn’t walk in to find me poring over her every thought and feeling. When our narrator “I secretly hope that I might be a […]

“I like stories where women save themselves.”

The Sleeper and the Spindle by Neil Gaiman

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Gaiman smushes the stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty together in this gorgeously illustrated novella.  The setting of the book is sometime after Snow White is awakened from her coffin and at the 100 year mark after Sleeping Beauty’s curse set in. But the stakes are raised when the sleeping sickness that has fallen on the princess and her kingdom is spreading out further and further as the curse lingers.  Several of the dwarves bring this to their queen, and conveniently she is looking […]



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