Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

NightinFail

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

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Spoilers in this review. This book made me tired. I confess, I do not get what everyone sees in The Nightingale. I feel like because it is set in WWII/the Holocaust, and we know that terrible things happened, this book had ALL OF THE TERRIBLE THINGS and we just accept that EVERY TERRIBLE THING happened to the characters because, of course, it was a time of terrible things. But it was too much; it was simply not believable to me after a point. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The protagonists are Isabelle and Vianne, two French sisters. These two […]

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6/23/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:48 |

The Review of the Great Books

The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels #2-4) by Elena Ferrante

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I really, really liked Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is an incredibly blase way to compliment a book so raw and confrontational and, well, brilliant. The remaining three books in the Neapolitan Novels series build on the strong momentum established by the first and, in the process, continue to be some of the most poignant reading I’ve experienced in ages. The feelings that these books provoked in me were strong and visceral, inflamed and tender in their ebb and flow. These are not feel-good stories, but they don’t feel gratuitous in their misery, either. As a woman, my vicarious […]

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6/22/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:47 |

“The girls were wild for dancing, and nothing else. No hearts beat underneath those thin, bright dresses. They laughed like glass.”

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine

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3.5 stars This is a very imaginative and clever re-telling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy-tale set in Prohibition NYC. The princesses are flappers and their father is some kind of business magnate trying to protect his family legacy without a son, the poor man. He keeps them locked up in their large home to protect their virtue and reputation, because that’s a surefire way to earn the obedience of teenagers. Here’s the overview from Goodreads: “Jo, the firstborn, “The General” to her eleven sisters, is the only thing the Hamilton girls have in place of a mother. She is […]

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6/14/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:44 |

Forgive me, I did not like this

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick

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I had problems with this book, honestly. I know it was tackling a difficult subject. I know that I am not the one to be evaluating and judging the well-being of suicidal teens, and the protagonist of this book is literally a boy planning to commit suicide, and he wants to take some people with him. Leonard’s confessional is all cynicism, antipathy, and naive self-centeredness, and right out of the gate his corrosive rationalizations for wanting to kill his classmate and himself are brashly laid out, daring the reader to catch a thrill with him as he sets out to […]

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5/31/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:43 |

“Her voice carried the voices of a hundred thousand souls in it; a whole history of resistance and rage moved with her.”

Shadowshaper (Shadowshaper #1) by Daniel José Older

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3.5 stars And my cantankerous/ambivalent streak continues. Shadowshaper had so many the elements of a book I should have really liked: an inventive, unique fantasy and magic practice, a foundation in folklore that hasn’t been done to death, a dynamic protagonist, and a diverse, reliable, realistic support system for that protagonist. Additionally, the audiobook was masterfully performed by Anika Noni Rose, making Shadowshaper a joy to listen to. But something about the book, that I can’t quite put a finger on other than having this undefinable aura of YA about it, zapped a lot of the freshness out of it. […]

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5/30/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:42 |

brb, reading this again

Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

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Laini. LAINI. What are you doing to me? I want to cry, right now, writing this review, thinking about Strange the Dreamer. It’s too much. It’s too beautiful, too peculiar, too visceral, too magical. What is in your imagination? How do you do this? Fantasy is such a stalwart genre for me because of how it truly takes me out of the every day and into a new place, sometimes a completely different place. Good fantasy has that quality of evoking wonder and provoking the wishful thinking that you can actually go there and experience. Laini Taylor’s fantasy is so […]

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5/26/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:41 |

Romance among resistance

An Extraordinary Union (Loyal League #1) by Alyssa Cole

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Courtney Milan has been a vocal fan of Alyssa Cole for awhile now, and I’m a vocal fan of Courtney Milan, so I have been harboring guilt for waiting until now to read Cole. Something about the blurbs for her previous series weren’t setting me on fire, but An Extraordinary Union sounded unique and daring — a black woman (Elle) undercover as a slave during the Civil War who falls for a white man (Malcolm) undercover as a Confederate soldier? Wow. I’m not trying to ascribe any vanity to Milan when I say this, but I totally get why she […]

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5/16/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:40 |

A classic that deserves the honor

Middlemarch by George Eliot

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Okay, so. Will it amuse you if I admit that I somehow did not know that this book is famously long? I’m over here trying to do these reading challenges and had finished my last audiobook, and so saw that this was available on Overdrive and thought “Neat! I’ll just slot that one right in there.” When I saw that the audiobook was over thirty hours long, I realized my mistake. Anyway, man. What an undertaking to read, and now, an undertaking to review. I always struggle reviewing classics (unless I hate them and can rail against them in a […]

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

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5/16/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:39 |

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