Cannonball Read 16

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I write about what I read so I can tell people I have a blog

Scootchyknees's Reviews:

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Gruesomely delightful

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

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This is an unusual take of the slasher genre that I found refreshing. Is that an appropriate word to use when talking about slashers? Probably not, but I’m not sure what would work better…it was gruesomely delightful. How’s that? I can’t say it’s the first of its kind – the story reminds me of Scream, or even, to a lesser extent, Cabin in the Woods, where there was a comical self-awareness of the genre embedded in the story. I was a Teenage Slasher is narrated […]

Dementia makes mysteries even more complicated

One Puzzling Afternoon by Emily Crutchley

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This book follows what I find to be a common formula: an (arguably) unreliable narrator, and two different timelines: one in the 50s and the other in the 2010s. So we get bits and pieces of a mystery about a missing girl in alternating chapters. Our narrator is 82-year-old Edie (or 15 years old in the 1950’s time-line). As a child, Edie is an outcast. She’s poor and has an unusual home-life, as her mother performs seances. Edie meets Lucy, the mayor’s daughter, and they […]

A haunting and memorable journey

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

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Lincoln in the Bardo is a story that you chew on. You can’t just sip it and multitask and hope to passively absorb it. You have to pay attention and actively read (or listen, in my case). But it’s so rewarding when you finish it, and worth the extra mental effort. If you’re like me and thinking a Bardo is something like a bar, you are completely wrong my friend. In buddhism, a bardo is a liminal space between death and rebirth. So we are […]

Another okay book in a series I keep going back to

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

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This is book nine in the Wayward Children Series, a series of books about children who have found portals into alternate worlds that can be the stuff of nightmares or dreams, depending on the child. A good thing about this series is that you could probably read the books out of order, since they deal with different children and worlds. But there are recurring characters and themes throughout, which might be lost by going out of order. This book is about Antsy, who has a […]

This kid’s worse than a villain

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume

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I’m a little embarrased to admit that I’d never read a Judy Blume book. I know Superfudge and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret were big hits when I was growing up. But I never picked them up, despite the fact I read a lot at that age. And now, I have a son in 4th grade. And he was reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. So I decided to read it too. And here’s my takeaway: Fudge is a terrible human being. […]

So much ejaculating in this book

The Hidden Hand or Capitola the Madcap by E.D.E.N. Southworth

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FLAMES AND FURIES! Get ready for hundreds of pages of exclamations, ejaculations, and interjections! But really, there is a lot of ejaculating in this book. The Hidden Hand was originally published in the 1850s in serialized form, but later published as a book in 1888. This is an overly dramatic, noir-styled, mustachioed twirling romp in which the characters only seem to speak in all caps and exclamation points. And to give you a feel of the writing, I will be ejaculating several times throughout this […]



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