Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Magically Heartwarming

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

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Crystalclear recommended The Magic Fish to me for it’s fairytales and the beautiful illustrations. And she couldn’t have been more right. Trung Le Nguyen weaves a heartwarming story of Tien and his mother, two Vietnamese immigrants living in the US who are trying to navigate language, culture, and coming of age while battling loneliness and family duty. Tien’s mother asks him to read her fairytales to help her with her English, and as they unfold, they remind her of how the fairytales are different in Vietetamese […]

Vitality and Mortality

The Everlasting: A Novel by Katy Simpson Smith

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Cbr14bingo Rec’d The description of this novel was irresistible for me — historical fiction that spans four very different time periods, linked by their location (Rome) and an object in common. It reminded me of Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, which I read and loved a long time ago. This novel is extraordinarily clever and well written but for some reason, most likely related to my own mental state these days, I had a hard time getting into it and I’m pretty sure I […]

New York City in the 70s man. You just had to be there

Just Kids by Patti Smith

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Last year I read Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, which takes place in the arts scene in New York in the early ‘70s. Just Kids feels like the novel that Kushner was trying to write, or at least the world she was trying to fit her characters into. The contrast between these two works was really highlighted by how vibrant and desire-filled Smith’s book is- the things that bothered me about The Flamethrowers were the limp, motive-less main character and the pretension of the art world […]

Two books about fat girls

Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

Faith: Taking Flight by Julie Murphy

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Dumplin’ By Julie Murphy   I’ve been meaning to read Dumplin’ for a while.  As a fat girl myself, it only seemed appropriate to read about another fat girl joining a beauty pageant.  But the story is so much more than that!   Willowdean Dixon is the daughter of a former Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant winner, one who never really left the pageant behind.  Willowdean’s mother runs the pageant every year, turning their lives into a pageant hurricane zone.  But it never really bothered […]

I finally get around to actually reading Olivia Dade

Teach Me by Olivia Dade

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4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Rec’d (by Emmalita, Narfna and FaintingViolet) Official book description: Their lesson plans didn’t include love. But that’s about to change… When Martin Krause arrives at Rose Owens’s high school, she’s determined to remain chilly with her new colleague. Unfriendly? Maybe. Understandable? Yes, since a loathsome administrator gave Rose’s beloved world history classes to Martin, knowing it would hurt her. But keeping her distance from a man as warm and kind as Martin will prove challenging, even for a stubborn, guarded ice queen. Especially when she begins […]

Like the circles that you find in the windmill of your mind

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Cbr13bingo Rec’d, Bingo #8 Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi has been reviewed about a dozen times on the Cannonball Read, first by tiny_bookbot and most recently by Debcapsfan. Every review of this book has been 4 or 5 stars. Published in 2020, Piranesi was nominated for the Nebula Best Novel and won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is an astonishing fantasy novel about the world of the mind and the myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. I must say that while I thought […]



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