Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

There’s always been a rainbow hangin over your head (CBR12Bingo: Violet – Blackout)

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

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I have to be honest, I never got the cult of Marilyn, even with an aunt whose sloe eyes and platinum hair invited a comparison she doubled down on by naming my cousin after Monroe. I’ve seen quite a few of her performances, and wasn’t unimpressed – you have to be pretty clever to play dumb convincingly, and even in her low-watt-bulb roles Marilyn never seemed dumb, just sort of airily unconcerned with whether she seemed smart or not. I’ve seen Niagara, I’ve seen Some […]

I would have liked more background and info about the rest of the crew

The Disasters by M.K. England

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#CBR12 Bingo: Violet (Obviously also works for Book Club, and will fit into Debut and maybe UnCannon and Friendship, as well)   All Nax Hall has ever dreamed of is going Ellis Station Academy and qualifying as a pilot. Unfortunately, he fails his entrance exam and is sent packing after less than twenty-four hours. Sharing his fate are Rion, Case and Zee, and while they’re all waiting for their one-way shuttle back to Earth, they are witness to a terrorist attack on the space station. The […]

Beautiful and Heartbreaking

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

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Set in the early 1940s, The Bluest Eye is the story of three young black girls living in Lorain, Ohio: two sisters, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, and a foster child taken in by their family, Pecola Breedlove.  The first page tells us that bad things are in store for Pecola- she becomes pregnant with her father’s baby and that baby dies- and then Claudia narrates the fall, winter and spring that lead to those events.  Interspersed in between Claudia’s chronological account of these three seasons […]

“Mister Isherwood?”

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

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CBR Bingo 12 – Violet This is an often very funny, ultimately sad novel about filmmaking in the 1930s. The character Christopher Isherwood narrates this novel (and if you have read others of his work you’ll know how he does with this). He’s tempted into a writing job, to work on a screenplay, by an old friend of his family. When he arrives, thinking that he wants to turn down the work because of a sense of vulgarity, he begins to change his tune as […]

“The only girl he liked in ages was going to kill him when she found out that he was trying to get her not to like him for a story.” (CBR12 Bingo)

Not the Girl You Marry by Andie J. Christopher

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In fulfilling the color squares that form one of the diagonals on the Bingo Card this year I have decided to go all-in with Romances. They have some of the most vibrant covers in publishing right now, and I’ve got a bunch to choose from. First up, because I feel particularly suited to choosing one at all, is the glorious violet color covered Not the Girl You Marry by Andie J. Christopher. I had every hope of this being a book for me, reviews from […]

We are just specks of dust in this world, glimmering for a moment in the sunlight and then disappearing into nothing. You have to learn to take your peace with that.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line: A Novel by Deepa Anappara

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Cbr12bingo Violet (this is also a debut novel if you are looking for one) Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a sort of detective novel told from the point of view of a nine year old boy who dreams of solving the mystery of the missing children from his “basti” (neighborhood, or in this case slum) in a major city in India. Author Deepa Anappara was inspired to write this story after spending time as a journalist interviewing children in the slums of Delhi […]



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