Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Second Books in a Series Always Drag

Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi

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This book is the second installment in the Legacy of Orisha series by Tomi Adeyemi. I enjoyed the first book, thanks to excellent character development and world-building. SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST BOOK FOLLOW!! After killing the evil King, Zelie and the King’s daughter work with other maji to fight against the evil Queen and the Prince, who is no longer on Zelie’s side. Now ordinary people like the Princess have magical powers, but those powers are slightly different from maji. Honestly, I don’t want to […]

“The tricky thing about giving opinions is that sometimes they cost you more than you wanted to spend.”

The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee

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Jo Kuan and her father figure Old Jin have gotten by pretty well, considering they are Chinese Americans in the deep South of 1890.  Old Jin works as a horse caretaker for a local wealthy family, and Jo has a talent for millinery, so she is hopeful for an apprenticeship at the shop she works.  However, she is abruptly fired one day due to her supposed overly-frank attitude with customers (“You make the customers uncomfortable”).  Old Jin is able to get her a position as […]

Lovely YA book about coming out as nonbinary.

I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver

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This was so good! I knew it would be. Too many of my GR friends whose opinions on books I usually align with loved it. I definitely wasn’t expecting to become so angry while reading the first several chapters that I could literally feel in my face that my blood pressure was rising, and the corners of my vision went sort of black. This poor child. All the poor children. What the fuck, parents, what the actual fuck is wrong with you. Oh my god, […]

Crown of Mutation

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

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My journey to Wilder Girls was thus: Get obsessed with the HBO Show, Devs Remember how much I like Alex Garland Re-watch Annihilation (a movie based off the first of the Southern Reach novels by Jeff VanderMeer) Go down the rabbit-hole reading Southern Reach reviews, spoilers, and theories Stumble across a Cannonball Read review which likened Wilder Girls to Annihilation Which brings me to now! I read through this novel over the Easter long weekend and was immediately captured by the imagery and premise. An […]

“And so I decided to make a remix of flambé shrimp a la Emoni, because what better way to take a leap of faith than to set something on fire and trust it will not only come out right, but that it will be completely delicious?”

With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

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This was lovely. Just a really well-told, sweet story. Emoni Santiago is an Afro-Puerto Rican-American high school senior living in Philadelphia and raising her two and half year old daughter, who she calls Babygirl, but whose given name is Emma. Emoni has had to grow up pretty quickly with the responsibility of raising a child, going to school, and working to help supplement her family’s income. She was also raised by her ‘Buela (grandmother), after her mother died in childbirth, and her father left to […]

Stop Scrolling!

Followers by Megan Angelo

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Followers gave me some seriously creepy and unsettling feelings. It’s a novel told from various points of view across two timelines: one group of characters lives in New York City in the year 2015, and the other group lives in a futuristic planned community monitored by cameras and streamed to the rest of America in 2051. Think Big Brother live, 23 hours a day, for a person’s entire life…oh plus product placements. Around 2016, there is something called the “spill” that happens and changes the […]



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