Cannonball Read 18

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 (my reviews are absolutely not meant to be taken in my professional capacity nor reflect the views of my institution). I've participated in some early CBRs and then came back for CBR 14 onwards. Much like every year, I'd like to do more reading for fun, especially of contemporary fiction, and less crashing in front of Netflix. 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. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: drmllz's Quick Questions interview.)

drmllz's Reviews:

Are you shining just for me?

City of Girls (2019) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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CBR14 Bingo square: Scandal! Vivian Morris is involved in a scandal that scandalises her suburban upper middle-class family; the theatre is generally considered to be a disreputable environment by the polite society that relishes it. Whether or not you like City of Girls will depend on whether or not you like Vivian Morris, narrator and heroine, who is a white rich suburban girl (daddy owns a mine, mother is obsessed with horses) kicked out of Vassar in 1940 and sent to live with her theatrical […]

‘The ocean was exactly as she’d imagined it’

Summer Sisters (1998) by Judy Blume

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CBR14 BINGO square: Shadow. (Holiday would be too easy.) Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters (1998) is a mood, a vibe, an energy, rather than a novel. It’s the salty taste of chips (or fries) and the soft sweetness of ice cream and the sharp chill of a vodka and cranberry with ice. It’s a long slow afternoon by the shore, a long slow stare into the shadows of the past. It’s strawberry lipgloss and windblown hair and new yellow swimsuits and singing along to ABBA and holding […]

“Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown”

Paper Towns (2008) by John Green

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When I was in high school at the turn of the century, while too young for bars and too old and cool for McDonalds, some friends and I would sit cross-legged on the platform between railway tracks at the train station of our town and play ‘pulse murder’. This was a game where you sat in a circle, and held hands, and one person was the murderer (I forget how they were assigned), and sent a number of squeezes, or pulses, around the circle. If […]

‘Elizabeth X. I bet you have no other Xs in your file.’

The Secret of Elizabeth (1978) by Vera Caspary

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The Secret of Elizabeth is poised between Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). Like The Woman in White, whose author it specifically invokes, it’s told in fragments–diaries, letters, retrospective musings–and there’s a dash of Victorian melodrama to the plot, which features psychiatric institutions and purity fanatics, and a sort of quasi-Victorian concern with sexual morality. Like Gone Girl, there’s a woman who causes trouble both when she turns up and when she disappears (we find out about events […]

‘She’s very good at stalling. Masterfully manipulative’

My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress (2022) by Rachel DeLoache Williams

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Note: Contains spoilers for Inventing Anna (2022) and My Friend Anna (2019, 2022) If you’ve watched Inventing Anna (2022) on Netflix, you know who Rachel is–the young woman who starts off optimistic and well-meaning, excited about her new friendship with Anna Delvey (and the luxe life that comes with her), and ends up anxious, then frantic, then an embittered nervous wreck, on the verge of losing her job at Vanity Fair. As opposed to the steely and poised Anna, whose tears and passion are carefully […]

If Jane was vain, and Rochester was…sort of the same

Dragonwyck (1945) by Anya Seton

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A Gothic scholar I follow on Twitter mentioned Dragonwyck quite recently, which recalled giddy memories of swooning at the suspense and romance and delicious clothes as an early teenager, probably too young to be reading about abusive relationships shrouded (at least initially) in glamour. But then again, I read Jane Eyre then too. So I ordered cheap secondhand paperback off Awesomebooks, and read it in a night. Miranda is a pretty farm girl with aristocratic aspirations, in Connecticut in the 1840s. A distant cousin, Nicholas Van […]



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