Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Room Mates

Make Room For Love by Darcy Liao

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: Recommendation. This was recommended to me at a romance bookstore when I was looking for sapphic romance tales with trans MCs. We’re in an age where the formerly established fact of multicultural democracy is becoming unsettled. And as such, more stories by gay, queer, trans, enby creatives are going to be going by the wayside. You’ll probably still have “the table” at Barnes & Noble as the bookstore tries to cash in on branding writers by their identity more […]

All My Life Is Changing Every Day…

Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks

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Read as part of CBR17Bingo: reread. I’m replacing the reread square with a free one here because I enjoyed this book, wanted to write about it and it doesn’t fit neatly into another category. When I was a kid, we didn’t have those conflabbed Hunger Games and young adult fantasy trilogies. We had Goosebumps and Babysitters Club and Matthew Christopher. We had real books, ones that were short and easy to digest, ones that didn’t touch on heavier themes beyond Being a kid sucks. This book […]

“Life is all about feeling too many different things at the same time. But you don’t have to figure it out right now.“

Donut Summer by Anita Kelly

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Anita Kelly’s YA debut, Donut Summer, has murdered me with adorable and relatable. It is funny and sweet, and deals with some serious topics in ways that feel realistic and manageable. Penny Dexter is ready to be a little bit different this summer, working at Delicious Donuts instead of an environmental science internship, and Mateo della Penna is going to screw it all up for her by working at Delicious Donuts too. The two have a history of not being friends, but Penny has cataloged […]

Love Islands

Not Like Before by Lily Seabrooke and Jacqueline Ramsden

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: starts with N.  I’ve been trying to read more books with trans authors and trans main characters. Given this perilous moment for trans people, I worry about the erasure of their stories. And I think it’s important to take them in. Also, the trans experience, like every other marginalized experience, is not one just of suffering and pain. Trans people feel joy, feel ecstasy, feel euphoria. Trans people live their lives like any other and mostly want the same […]

Macho, macho man. I gotta be a macho man.

The Burnt Toast B&B (Bluewater Bay Book 5) by Heidi Belleau and Rachel Haimowitz

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CBR16 Bingo: Vintage Derrick is a screw up, or at least he thinks he is. Laid off from his logging job, he moved back home to his parents’ house, which is also a B&B in the small Pacific Northwest town of Bluewater Bay. Losing his parents in a car accident was devastating, and watching their dreams crumble beneath his incompetent fingers is too much to bear. Derrick barely maintains the B&B and relies heavily on Jim, his ex, for emotional support and occasional dog sitting […]

Trans and Transitions

Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: liberate. Carlotta is coming home from prison, which is some sort of liberation and she’s trying to find her way as a trans woman in the world, seeking her own path to liberation. I’ve written before about my beef with contemporary writing and how smarmy it’s become. Every villain has to twirl their mustache, every hero has to overcome a specific obstacle to warm the audience’s heart, everything is so boringly Manichaean. There’s little space for complexity, imperfection, growth, […]



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