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:

The Monster of Grief

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

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It took me three-quarters of the way through A Monster Calls before I began to appreciate it. Throughout much of the book I was repelled by the protagonist’s unlikability, and his bottomless anger at everything and everyone in his life. But then my view changed. The main character is a boy named Conor. His mother is sick with cancer, he rarely sees his father who lives in another country, and his mother’s mother is cold to him. Conor is plagued by an unspeakable dream every […]

A Will, A Murder, My Apathy

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

by 13 Comments

Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game is not a bad book. It has a lot of cliched mystery elements though: strangers brought together by a mysterious benefactor, a murder, a will reading, etc. It has the trappings of an Agatha Christie novel, but less skilled. In the beginning a group of people from all walks of life each receive a letter offering them a luxurious apartment for a modest price. The letter is signed by someone they don’t know, but the offer is so good none […]

Motley and Mysteries

The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie

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“The trouble is that we are not content just to see things—we will tack the wrong interpretation onto the things we see.” – The Mysterious Mr. Quin Another Cannonballer recently reviewed this book, and it prompted me to read it again. The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie is a bit of an anomaly in her oeuvre. Mr. Quin is a mysterious character with almost supernatural abilities to come and go. Mr. Satterthwaite, the book’s third person narrator and an inveterate scholar of the human […]

The End is Never the End

The End by Lemony Snicket

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The final, and 13th, book in A Series of Unfortunate Events is fittingly titled The End. It has taken me about a month to finish the entire series and I confess by this book some of the story’s tics had worn me down a bit. I was no longer entertained by the constant definitions of words and phrases for humorous effect. The Baudelaire orphans, I felt, had become predictable and even a little boring. I enjoyed the villain Count Olaf more than the main characters. […]

A YA Book that Quotes Richard Wright

The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket

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Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the sky-scrapers in our cities toppling? — Richard Wright, Native Son The Penultimate Peril is the 12th book–the penultimate book–of A Series of Unfortunate Events. For my reviews of the 10th and 11th books, go here and here. The travails of the Baudelaire orphans continue in The Penultimate Peril, and if anything, get darker. The book takes place in the Hotel Denouement, where the children take on […]

We All Live in a Broken Submarine

The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket

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The Baudelaires drifted along in cold, dark silence, feeling afraid and confused and strangely lonely. – The Grim Grotto After reading Book 11 The Grim Grotto in A Series of Unfortunate Events, a heretofore unknown thalassophobia has seized me. Maybe that’s why this book in the series seemed the darkest thus far. For background on the series, see my review here. Calling this the grimmest book of the series is saying something. The Baudelaire orphans have been on the run from the villainous Count Olaf […]



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