Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About esmemoria

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In my walking around life, I miss my old, blind pug (the Ancient Mariner), help amazing college students become teachers, and tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: esmemoria's Quick Questions interview.)

esmemoria's Reviews:

How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This

A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib

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I love poetry, and am hopeless at both understanding and explaining it. TS Eliot said “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” I love the words and rhythms and feeling, but I don’t always understand a poem in its entirety. So I apologize in advance for not being able to say anything sophisticated about Hanif Abdurraqib’s astonishing book of poetry, A Fortune for Your Disaster. Abdurraquib is a Black poet who writes with great fierceness and beauty about the Black experience, freedom, confinement, death, […]

Sometimes You Just Get Tired

Every Last Fear by Alex Finlay

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I feel like I should apologize for so many “meh” reviews as of late. I guess I’m in a grouchy reader phase (ever have one of those?) But I’m glad Alex Finlay’s Every Last Fear won’t be the book with which I finish my cannonball. I dunno, I’m just tired of half-assed thrillers written by mediocre writers. I love mysteries, suspense novels and thrillers. I’ve read a lot of good ones and some bad ones. But the novels that depress me the most are the […]

Let’s Get Silly!

Archie: Volume One by Fiona Staples et. al.

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I can’t even believe I’m reviewing this. I’m going to have to streeeeeetch my words out because what is there to say about Archie that hasn’t been said for decades? Archie is the star of Riverdale High. Girls love him. Guys want to be him. He plays the guitar and women swoon. He loves down-to-earth Betty but is swept up by the foxy Veronica. Jughead eats burgers. Reggie is a creep. What else is there to say? Nothing new, really, but the book Archie, Volume […]

A Modern Encyclopedia Brown

All the Wrong Questions: Question 1 by Lemony Snicket

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Dan Handler, writing as Lemony Snicket, wrote the A Series of Unfortunate Events books. I LOVED those books. They were brilliant—funny, smart, and not afraid to dig into hard topics like grief and death. So when I saw this new series, All the Wrong Questions: Question 1 (aka “Who Could that be at this Hour?”), I hopped right on it. The story features Snicket as a 13 year old boy who is roped into a mysterious mission to recover a stolen artifact. He is whisked […]

“Now the only thing I ask is that they respect the loneliness to come”

Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

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Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatín is a very brief book about a man who takes care of people wasting away from an unnamed disease in his beauty salon. Now known as the Terminal, the salon was once the narrator’s pride. It was a dazzling space where he and his two close friends would cut women’s hair and perform other beauty treatments. He describes being thrown out of his family home for being gay and how he built his beauty salon into a successful business. At […]

Mother, Come Home

Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier

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I don’t normally title my reviews the same title as the book I read, but in this case there is nothing else to do. Mother, Come Home is a graphic novel by Paul Hornschemeier about a small boy, Tommy, and the suicides of both of his parents. His mother is so ill from cancer that she asks her husband to help her die, which he does. The emptiness and guilt he feels for killing his deeply loved wife eventually ends in his own suicide, which […]



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