Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Beautiful, harrowing and oh so sad

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

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CBR16 Bingo: Liberate (our protagonists are fighting in World War I to keep the world safe from the Germans) Official plot summary, because I finished this book in early April: It’s 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they’re too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle – an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, […]

It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly.

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

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I’m not sure if I can categorize this book as dark academia, but the characters and the story remind me so much of what I enjoyed about “If We Were Villains” and “The Secret History,” it is impossible for me not to draw parallels between them. All three stories are linked by a sudden and violent death, and how those left behind cope with their secrets. Paul is a seventeen-year-old who has recently graduated from high school. He lives with his mother and his two […]

Do with their death bury their parents’ strife

Brickmakers by Selva Almada

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Chins slightly raised. Eyes locking on eyes. The rest hardly matters: an afternoon of scalding sun, a cloudy night, the middle of a dance hall, the soccer field in the pink evening light, some street in the center of town. Meanwhile, the music is always the same: the panting, the sound of fists, the cracking of knuckles before they land the first blow, the hiss of saliva, the occasional groan when a jab lands right in the liver, and the guys egging them on, always […]

hide all you want, but nothing stays buried

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

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Jeanie and Julius have spent their entire lives together. Over half a century of life together has passed, and they have never spent an entire night separate from each other. Jeanie tends the garden with their mother, Dot, and Julius works odd jobs in the village. Jeanie, Julius, and Dot depend fiercely on one another. They accept nothing from the outside world- at least, Jeanie and Julius spent the last 51 years believing that they were accepting nothing and indebted to no one but each […]

Manipulated Into Caring

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

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For a tale of four siblings bound together by a traumatic experience with a fortune teller when they were young, The Immortalists is not terribly enthralling. Varya, Simon, Klara, and Daniel, the siblings, meet an old woman in a cramped and hot apartment. They have saved up and pooled their allowance; they overheard other kids in the neighborhood saying that “the woman on Hester Street” could tell you the date of your death. She gives gives our fearless foursome their dates; they do not share them with […]

“When you’re a kid, it’s hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.”

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

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Karen Russell was just 25 when this collection came out; a fact that is plastered all over the cover, festooned in blurbs throughout the opening pages, and the header on almost every piece of criticism that was launched at the same time as this collection. Her youth is/was impressive, and most certainly made me look back at my 25-year-old self with pity, but her youth is not the spark that sets this fire. She may have been young, but her ability to give voice to […]



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