Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Meeting of the Tortured Poets Society

Tangled in Knots: A Dark Omegaverse Novel by Jenn Bullard

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Jenn Bullard’s Tangled in Knots: A Dark Omegaverse Novel is a hard sell. It requires an enormous number of trigger warnings. I’m not even sure that I *want* to recommend it. Don’t get me wrong – Bullard is a talented writer and creates a very detailed and realized world – but then concept of the book is just… DARK doesn’t even begin to cover it. STOP READING NOW IF YOU ARE EASILY DISTURBED BY VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. As with most Omegaverse […]

The Value in Horrible Things is What You Make of Them

There Are No Saints by Sophie Lark

There is No Devil by Sophie Lark

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Sophie Lark has written herself a duology that is seriously dark and twisted with There Are No Saints and There is No Devil. Go ahead and insert a blanket trigger warning here. If you are easily offended or triggered by any thing, this is not the set of books for you. In fact, I almost didn’t start them when I realized that Cole, the male lead, is a serial killer, and that the female lead, Mara, is his latest obsession. Because that is messed up on […]

“Do you have sadness in your heart for the world that can never be & sensible shoes? You’ve got weltschmerz.” *

Roxy by Neal Shusterman, Jarrod Shusterman

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I don’t think I’ve ever positively reviewed a book I haven’t finished, but this here’s going to be the first. Because I’m the kind of person who can’t rewatch the Scott’s Tots episode of The Office, and who cringes just thinking about that one scene in On His Way to the Wedding (by Julia Quinn: Spoiler for a Bridgerton book ahead) when Gregory professes his love in front of all of London, and … it does not go well.  I just sometimes get to a point […]

In which I finally rectify having never read an American master of writing

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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[TW: violence against children, racial slurs, depictions of slavery, abuse] BINGO – UnCannon In high school I took two AP English classes. In college, I took a Comparative Western Literature course. Toni Morrison was not on any of my reading lists for those courses despite the fact that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and that Beloved was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. Perhaps, Morrison is not read more at […]

Absolutely do not read this book

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

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BINGO – The Wilds [TW: sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse, abuse of a minor, gun violence, language (which I’ve included in white text below)] There’s been some discussion recently on Cannonball Read about how far into a book does one go before giving up. My procedure is to give a a book at least 1/3 of its total page count before giving up entirely. My 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Julie Cogburn (one of the best I ever had), shared this procedure with us. […]

My high hopes for horror were halted

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

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I read another one of Enriquez’s collections of short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, earlier this year. I loved that collection so much. In my review, I called it the ‘most effective collection of short stories I [had] ever read’ and a ‘knockout’. I figured that Things We Lost in the Fire would be similar. Unfortunately that is not the case. In Things We Lost in the Fire, we have the same elements in each short story present in the collection of short stories in The Dangers […]



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