Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An Influencer Goes Missing…

Such A Bad Influence by Olivia Muenter

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But how long before her adoring public starts suspecting she staged it for the views? If something isn’t captured for content did it even really happen? Evie Davis is a second generation social media star, famous since the age of five due to her influencer mom. She’s just turned eighteen with tons of followers, a Youtuber boyfriend, and a momager with her best interests at heart of course. Her older sister Hazel is living the more typical broke 20s lifestyle after having refused to participate […]

I Have No Idea Where We Are Going and I Ain’t Mad

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

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cbr16bingo dreams Well, now.  This took quite a few unexpected turns! It starts off as your bog-standard evil house with a few skeletons (cough) in its closets.  Nobody seems to want Baneberry Hall, tucked away in the remote bits of Vermont.  But a young couple, Ewan and Jess, thinks it’s a treat and the price is certainly right.  They move right in with their five year old daughter, Maggie.  They are only there twenty days before they flee in the middle of the night. Ewan […]

Freaky, Funny, and Frustrating (In a Good Way)

Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi

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Every time I think that I may have Helen Oyeyemi figured out she hits me with another blast of wild magic. She often deals in the inner workings of fairy tales, but this time she has taken on a fairy tale of a city: Prague. We’ve all heard of the (super played out trope) of “New York City IS a character!”, but Prague is in charge here. Prague may be driving the theoretical bus, but Thea, Hero, and a cast of bizarre folks including a […]

Welcome to the funhouse

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

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Others have and will review this better than I can, but what the heck, i’ll take a stab at it. This book seems to inspire either intense love or intense hate and not much in between based on the reviews at goodreads. However, it won lots of prizes and was on several “best of” lists, so i gave it a shot. And my final verdict? An impressive high wire act that is a chore to read. The author has finely crafted a work of metafiction, […]

I Got On This Train Too

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This review is for the audiobook version of The Girl On The Train. I’ve had mixed feelings about this book. I had to stop listening to it because the narrators were getting on my nerves, but then picked it back up to try again. They still bothered me, but the story got better, and the end was somehow both exciting and predictable simultaneously. As others have noted, the narrators are all unreliable, as are the accounts we get from those they interact with. This novel […]

Depression, and blackouts, and murder(?), OH MY!

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If you are looking for a well written, fast moving psychological thriller in the vein of Gillian Flynn’s brilliant Gone Girl you will be entertained and satisfied with The Girl on the Train. Like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train uses an unreliable narrator structure to keep the reader off balance, revealing information bits at a time so that your understanding of the story keeps changing. It also features characters that are largely unlikable, yet strangely compelling, and keeps you turning the pages even […]



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