Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“In my shoes, a walking sleep / And my youth I pray to keep”

Heatstroke (2020) by Hazel Barkworth

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Heatstroke (2020) is clever–cleverer than its cover, certainly cleverer than its title. I remember that the review blurbs on the covers of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (2006) and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me (2012) signposted how terrifying teenaged girls can be–and this is certainly a thing, the way teenage girls are inscribed with contradictions of power and anxiety, and Heatstroke does deal with that–but I remember thinking, well, it’s actually the mother that is fairly fucking monstrous in Sharp Objects, and parental figures are pretty absent […]

The Perks of No Longer Being a Teenager

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

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Oh, this book. I treated it like a sacred text back in high school. I gave it regular re-reads through the beginning of college, but then I let it fade into the background. It used to be my “Fall” book (despite it covering an entire school year) and while I continued to think back on fondly, I started to replace that nostalgia drip with the character-created playlists from within the book. It’s been years since I last picked it up, but Ride’s “Vapour Trail” creeps […]

Looking for a story about a man in love with a cannon?

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

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…because have I got the book for you! Men loving cannons, zombies puking up pajamas, purses that can hold whole villages, horror writers that moonlight as upholsterers- this collection houses all of those freaks and geeks- and then some. The novella that gives this collection its title – Magic for Beginners– was the best of the bunch. It was difficult to single out one piece, as they are all delightful mix of suburban longing and creepy crawlies, but this piece reminded me of two of my […]

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules… was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things.”

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Celeste Ng seems to like to write books where it seems like they start with a mystery or crime scene, but the book isn’t really about the mystery. Things don’t get solved. People don’t get closure or absolution. You’re led to the end as a reader, but you feel just as lost as the characters surely do. Here’s the summary bit from Goodreads: In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to […]

Little Boxes on the hillside, Little Boxes all the same

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I meant to read Everything I Never Told You ages ago but I think I had read too many novels about family secrets and suburbia at the time and kept putting it off for later.  I always meant to get around to it, but with the whole Reese Witherspoon book club and optioning of Little Fires Everywhere, I decided to start with Ng’s follow up. The novel, set in 1998, begins in early summer in suburban Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland, Ohio.  Ng hints at previous […]

Exit onto Revolutionary Road for bleak amazingness

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I recently reconnected with a good friend of days gone by, and we started chatting books, which led to shipping books to each other, and he sent this one along as one of his favorites.  I had a vague memory of the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, never having seen it, just aware of its existence, but wasn’t familiar with the story in the least.  I had my friends stellar recommendation to go on and was confident I would like it, but did […]



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