Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Cutting Edge and Daisy Jones with edge

The Favorites by Layne Fargo

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Bingo: Play (for the sports angle since ice dancing, though everyone is very serious about it) (Bingo #6, 2nd row complete) This novel came on my radar last year on one of those anticipated novels of 2025 because of the description, and I checked out the author’s They Never Learn as a result while waiting for this one – I liked that one quite a bit but didn’t love it. Finally picked this one up – if you love The Cutting Edge, Daisy Jones and […]

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”

Fifteen Wild Decembers: A Novel by Karen Powell

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Fifteen Wild Decembers tells the story of the Brontë family through the eyes of Emily, from 1825 when she first goes away to school, to her death in 1848. From their childhood tales of the fantastical island of Gondal, to the events in their lives that shaped them and their literary outputs, Fifteen Wild December offered a glimpse into their lives. It was an alright book; I’d love to rate it any more warmly than that, but it didn’t really inspire much in me. I […]

“Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master-something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.” – Charlotte Bronte

Heathcliff Redux: A Novella and Stories by Lily Tuck

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We have a Heathcliff problem. We fantasize on the regular about a brooding hulk smoldering just out of view. He’s there- he’s part of the nature of the area, and we are going to conquer that nature. We are going to nurture the brutish man. We are going to fix him, and he’s going to rescue us. Except, we know the truth. We are going to ruin ourselves trying to capture him, and it isn’t going to change him in the slightest. Our narrator in Heathcliff […]

ooohhhh booyy is it not a love story

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

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This book was given to me as a parting gift when I left Yorkshire. I had been to Haworth to see the Brontë parsonage and I’d walked the moors behind the house and I had lived in and understood the sweet melodic dialect of West Yorkshire. All this lent the book a certain sweetness that the two horrible main characters did everything in their power to disrupt. I mean, I knew this wasn’t going to be a love story, but like ooohhhh booyy is it […]

Poems; Girls; Heights; Faces

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Long Way Down – 5/5 To paraphrase Jason Reynolds in an interview he gives at the end of the book, this is a combination of “Boyz in the Hood” and “A Christmas Carol.” As with other Jason Reynolds novels, there’s a central conflict between what a character feels is the right thing to do based on his lived experience, the implicit messages that happen around him, the images, his history, and lots of other coded and secretive influences versus the on the paper ethics of […]

One Great Pre-Victorian Domestic

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I think a personal theme of this year’s cannonball has been the ruining of books well-remembered. I read Wuthering Heights in high school and loved it. As that was many years ago, I thought I’d do a re-read to see if I would still enjoy what the book jacket describes as ‘one of the most haunting and atmospheric love stories ever written.’ I’m sure I agreed with that sentiment as a sixteen-year-old. But now…. Let me start with a list of all the things this […]



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