Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It Was Kind of Different So She Never Read it Again

The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal

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Though I am not from Minnesota, I have spent some quality time living there—in college and then afterwards so reading this was both fun and a little nostalgic.  The small details, both comical and kind, are what really make these characters come alive.  Also, I was already missing spending quality time inside my town’s two local nano-breweries and this made me miss them even more (even as I drink their beverages at home). This novel tells the story of two sisters, Edith and Helen, whose […]

Dysfunction Junction

Sisters: A Novel by Daisy Johnson

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If you enjoy a novel with a questionable/unreliable narrator, then Sisters is for you. Clocking in at just over 200 pages, it is the kind of book you could get through in a day, and the plot is such that the reader will want to find out exactly what has happened and why. This makes it a little tricky to review without spoilers, but here we go. Teenagers July and September are sisters, with only 10-months difference in their ages. September is definitely the dominant […]

the Sanderson sisters are still my favorite witchy siblings, but the Owens family are not messing around!

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

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Lookout y’all, it’s re-read time! Alice Hoffman used to be a favorite author of mine; we slowly went our separate ways after The Museum of Extraordinary Things. There was no big breakup; we just grew apart. We wanted different things. The separation was so slow and gentle that I forgot that she was an author that I really liked, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a new prequal to Practical Magic hitting the shelves, oh wait, there already was a prequal? This […]

“He breathed in my face the coffee he’d just drunk, mingled with the odor of his gums.”

A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

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1970s Naples: a thirteen year old girl of privilege is suddenly removed from her seaside home and returned to a cramped and dirty apartment outside the city.  The key word here is “returned”; our heroine has been sent “home” to a place that she never knew. She spent her entire life living with her glamorous mother and policeman father, only to have that reality shattered in one afternoon when the man she knew as her father bundles her and all of her belongings into the […]

Watch out, boy, she’ll chew you up

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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#CBR11 Bingo: Pajiba (reviewed by Kayleigh here) (Would also work for “Award winner”, “Own voices”, “Listicle”, “Cannonballer Says”, and possibly, “Far and Away”) Official book description: Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps […]

A little Dollop will do ya

Dollop and Mrs. Fabulous by Jennifer Sattler

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There is nothing new about Dollop and Mrs. Fabulous. There is the big sister as “Mrs. Fabulous” who has her rules for the tea party she is having, the one where younger sister Dollop (so bored with her own toys and games) will ask to join. And Dollop is just Dollop and she does her own thing. If that means putting her toy-friend in time out, or herself dressing as a ninja, that is what she does. However, Mrs. Fabulous tells her sister ninjas do […]



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