Cannonball Read 10

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Ale

I'm adjuncting in creative writing, and I'm in the midst of finishing a novel I'd like to send for publication by the end of 2018. CBR has definitely helped my writing since now I know what readers are looking for and not looking for in their works. So, thank you, CBR! Hopefully someday, we'll be able to review my novel on this blog. :)

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Ale's Reviews:

Here, There Be a Lot of Info Dump

Here, There Be Dragons by James Owen

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One of my students suggested this book to me last year, and I finally got around to getting it from the library.  If I was twelve years old again, I would have absolutely loved this book and been hooked for the duration of the series. It was fanciful, had a cute ending, and hit all the correct markers for decent kids’ fantasy, but the older I get, the harder a time I have sinking into YA fantasies, and this book was no exception. Our three main men, John, Jack, and Charles are all Oxford men who end up in the […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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8/13/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:16 |

Hooked Until the Epilogue

A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua

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I was so, so about this book until literally the last three pages. Don’t read them. Skip the Epilogue, it’ll just ruin the previous 300 pages. Why am I so angry about 3 pages? Because the rest of this book was so freaking good and so absolutely timely and necessary, that to be so stupendously let down in 3 short pages just felt wrong. Where was the editor on that one? But I digress, A River of Stars follows Scarlett Chen as she finds herself an unwilling immigrant on a visitors’ visa to California. Scarlett falls for her married boss […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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8/6/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:15 |

A Romance? Historical Fiction? Who Knows?

The Turquoise by Anya Seton

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Through some rabbit hole on the internet, I stumbled across the name Anya Seton and a fancy cover for her book, The Turqouise. Intrigued, I waited patiently for the inter-library loan snail to bring it to me, and boy was I surprised when the book delivered was a battered hardcover bound with actual thread and smelling of an octogenarian’s basement.  While slightly put-off, I accepted it anyway and went home to discover the strange and satisfying pleasure of reading an old book. I ripped my fare share of pages just turning them, but the weight of the paper, old typeset font, and […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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7/30/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:14 |

Pratchett Did It Better

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

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I haven’t read a Vonnegut since high school and thought it might be nice to revisit some of the “greats” this summer. I went into Cat’s Cradle cold, and while it was amusing at times and made some fine points, it was exactly what I expected a post-modern classic written by a man of his time to be….In a word: meh. Our narrator starts on a quest to write a book about the day the Atomic Bomb hit Hiroshima, but instead ends up finding religion with a fatalist view of the world. We meet some caricatured characters, travel to a made up […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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7/11/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:13 |

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

The Power by Naomi Alderman

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Buzzfeed’s book reviews have never steered me wrong, so when one of their lists suggested The Power as a must-read Dystopian novel, I felt I should give it a go. And it was WORTH IT. Disturbing, mind-bending, and surprising, The Power feels like this generation’s answer to The Handmaids Tale. I was not surprised to read that Alderman thanks Margaret Atwood in her acknowledgements because the book follows an updated take on the The Handmaid’s Tale structure. Complete with excerpts from fictional archaeological findings to the mind blowing epilogue and chapters counting down to an unknown coming, The Power is riveting and twisted. At the start of […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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6/27/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:12 |

A Year in Japan

My Year of Dirt and Water: Journal of a Zen Monk's Wife in Japan by Tracy Franz

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Tracy Franz’ memoir, My Year of Dirt and Water chronicles the year her husband, Koun attends intensive training in a cloistered temple to become a Zen Monk. Alone with only intermittent access to Koun during his residency, Franz is left to navigate the foreignness of an unknown culture as well as the foreignness she feels in herself. The book is structured in a set of running diary entries broken up by seasons, chronicling both the linear time of Japan’s holidays and climate, as well as Franz’ own emotional changes as she works through each month of Koun’s residency. I’ll be […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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6/13/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:11 |

How the Other Half Lives

My Brilliant Friend by Elene Ferrante

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I revisited this book for class, and while the language and visceral imagery remained the same this time as it did on my first read, I was struck this time by just how much the theme of education ran through this story. For a general recapping of the story, here’s the amazon blurb: “Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex […]

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Purchase My Brilliant Friend by Elene Ferrante or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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6/13/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:10 |

Stick With This One, It’s Worth It

Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson

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This is my first ever experience reading a book before print, and it took a little while for me to get into this one, but once I was in, the payoff was worth it. Never Anyone But You follows Suzanne and Claude (Luci) from falling in love as teenagers in the early 1900s through the many different Paris art movements post World War I, onto their Nazi resistance during World War II, and their final years on the small isle of Jersey. In truth, the first 100 pages of this book were a little rough to find my footing in, and […]

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Purchase Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson or any item from amazon via our link.

Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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4/26/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:9 |


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