Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About drmllz

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I'm a literature and media studies lecturer and researcher at a university on the south coast of England. I've participated in some early CBRs and then CBR14--I didn't quite make my goal but I made a Bingo and enjoyed getting back into it! Much like last year, I'd like to do more reading for fun, especially of contemporary fiction, and less crashing in front of Netflix this year. In 2021 I had a cancer diagnosis and surgery--it really helped following along with CBR reads and Facebook chat and knowing there were people out there enjoying reading books and supporting cancer research and patients even amid all the pandemic chaos.

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“Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously”

Sawkill Girls (2018) by Claire Legrand

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I find it hard to write or think about YA fiction without thinking about Taylor Swift sometimes–in this particular case, ‘Seven’ from Folklore (2020): “Please picture me in the weeds / Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously /Any time I wanted.” Sawkill Girls is a scream of a book beneath its veneer of preppy popularity politics and teenage drama and desire: a scream of fear and despair and fury, a loud barbaric yawp against vanishing and silencing, a howl against monsters and the different […]

“Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild”

Every Gift a Curse (2023) by Caroline O'Donoghue

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“I can feel our bravery fall away as we journey into the wood. We are not built for this. We are not the folksy teenagers you see in adventure stories. There is no one who’s a dab hand at archery, or who can chart our journey by looking at the last few visible stars.” (371-372) Every Gift a Curse is the third and final in Irish author Caroline O’Donoghue’s YA ‘Gifts’ trilogy, following All Our Hidden Gifts (2021) and The Gifts That Bind Us (2022). […]

‘A million girls would kill for this job’

The World's Worst Assistant (2022) by Sona Movsesian

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CBR bingo square ‘funky’, because…Sona Movsesian seems like a funky and groovy person, and Conan O’Brien used to do a funky little ‘string dance’ with his hips, and Max Weinberg and the Max Weinberg 7 were pretty funky back in the day, and Sona Movsesian is Conan O’Brien’s assistant. If I haven’t horribly misjudged the time difference and therefore deadline or missed something else egregious, I believe this review completes a bingo for me. ‘A million girls would kill for this job’ is, of course, […]

Foiling spies and spying foils

The Ministry of Unladylike Activity (2022) by Robin Stevens

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CBR Bingo ‘Font’ square–the title on the cover embeds a cool little plane, a magnifying glass, and a fluttering blackout curtain in its lettering, while the print text inside is interspersed with lists and notes that look like handwriting. Robin Stevens’s ‘Murder Most Unladylike’ series (2014-2021) is rather marvellous; it starts off in a very English boarding school in the early 1930s, where the very English Honourable Daisy Wells befriends Hazel Wong, a new girl from Hong Kong who is trying to find her place […]

“My boy was a montage”

The Summer I Turned Pretty (2009) by Jenny Han

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This is for the Adapt/Camel cbr14bingo square; the book and its sequels have been adapted into a series on Amazon Prime, and narrator Isabel ‘Belly’ Conklin has to adapt to her changing body and growing up and the things and people she’s taken for granted changing around her. “My boy was a montage / A slow-motion, love potion/ jumping off things in the ocean / I broke his heart cause he was nice”, sings Taylor Swift on ‘Midnight Rain’, the sixth track of her new album. […]

“As far from God, as heaven is wide”

The Language of Bees (2009) by Laurie R. King

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CBR Bingo square: Minds: Sherlock Holmes and his wife Mary Russell are solving the mystery of Sherlock’s missing daughter-in-law and granddaughter; minds are vulnerable to influence by the predatory; Damian Adler is a surrealist artist who rejects reason in his paintings. I was given The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994), the first in Laurie R. King’s ‘Russell and Holmes’ (yes, that Holmes) series for my birthday last year, and read it in the weeks following my surgery in May. It was a hot and arid few weeks, […]



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