Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

YA Round-Up

A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1) by Brittany Cavallaro

The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes, #2) by Brittany Cavallaro

Pulp by Robin Talley

The Black Coats by Colleen Oakes

The Princess and the Fangirl (Once Upon a Con, #2) by Ashley Poston

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Here are several YA novels, most of which were pretty good (Pulp was GREAT) if anyone needs to fill a Youths square! (4 stars) A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes #1) by Brittany Cavallaro I was going to wait and review these for the Sherlock Retelling discussion, but then I realized I’ll be out of town for that and I’m terrible about participating in those discussion anyway so instead I’m going to review it now so y’all can read it and discuss it in my place. […]

Sadly, a disappointment after I’d been looking forward to it for years.

Pulp by Robin Talley

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I liked this well enough, but I’m beginning to wonder if Talley isn’t a one-hit wonder for me. I LOVED her first book, but the ones I’ve read after have just been meh. I’m especially sad because as soon as I heard the premise for this book I immediately wanted it in my hands (a young girl from our time who is a lesbian begins researching lesbian pulp fiction from the 1950s for a school project, and fixates on a particular author, and the narrative is split between […]

YA Historical Fiction with a Lot to Dissect

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“For eighteen years I’ve believed what other people told me about what was right and what was wrong. From now. I’m deciding.” I have seen a few very favorable reviews of this YA novel already, and I must say that I too really liked it for both the clear writing style, but also the handling of the serious subject matter therein, though I do think that perhaps one side of the story was much stronger than the other. Lies We Tell Ourselves shifts between the […]

First love, gender, and other complicated things

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Sometimes, a random internet search leads you to some awesome places. One night two weeks ago, I was in the library. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to read, so I did a search for Southern Lesbian fiction. There were no new Rita Mae Brown books (that weren’t fox or cat related) and most of titles the query returned, the library didn’t have. (I know, shocking that a fairly conservation, Northern NJ, small-town library wasn’t overflowing with Southern Lesbian lit, right?) However, they did […]

And so, lesbian Macbeth.

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K, so first if you haven’t read Macbeth, um, why? Go do that. Second, this book is a pretty good adaptation of it, though not perfect. Talley translates the Scottish kings, lords, and various witches into the haunted setting of a boarding school that used to be a plantation in the antebellum south. Kings become teenage girls, witches become spirits, and what was straightforward murder in the original play becomes something more complicated here. Ultimately, this book was enjoyable, but I thought the first half […]

Segregation, hate, and love

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When we learned about the Civil Rights movement in grade school, we watched videos of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches and some of the protests. I remember being horrified at the racist, white people screaming with all the righteous indignation their stupidity could muster. I figured they must  be so ashamed of themselves now–having been caught on the wrong side of history with their violent ignorance. As much as those videos affected me, I still did not understand the reality of living in the South […]



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