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:

Drugs and Other Unreliable Narrators

Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson

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I read this with my mentor for our Advanced Fiction course, and it’s definitely far outside my wheelhouse in both content and structure. Johnson’s story follows an unnamed addict through a series of short snippets told out of order chronicling his cycle of addiction and rehabilitation. Johnson’s choice to tell this story out of order worked very well, as we get to see all the different facets of the narrator regardless of where he is in his habits, or what he’s doing.  All the narration is done in first person, giving us a difficult job of deciding whether or not […]

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9/13/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:19 |

“I Won’t Think About It Today, I’ll Think About It Tomorrow”

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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I watched “Gone With the Wind” when I was thirteen and came out distinctly disappointed at the end of the interminable film. At thirteen, I couldn’t put into words what was so disappointing about it, the costumes had been beautiful, the sets glorious. There was a love story, and the plot was easy to follow. But it left me wanting. As an adult, I know that it was Scarlett who disappointed me. I had never yet in my young life come across a main character so absolutely ruthless and with no redeeming quality. She was a character people loved to […]

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

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8/28/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:18 |

It Did Its Job

One for the Money: A Stephanie Plum Novel by Janet Evanovich

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I totally stepped out of the comfort zone for this one. It was both a romance (which I never read) and a story taking place in my least favorite decade (1980s), but in the spirit of CBR Bingo I went full speed ahead. Our New Jersey native, Stephanie Plum, is down on her luck, recently laid off from her job as a lingerie buyer, and the creditors are calling. She needs some fast cash, and because this is New Jersey, her cousin Vinnie is a bail bondsman looking to hire some bounty hunters. She’s never done the job and has […]

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

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8/20/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:17 |

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 |


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