Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About Zirza

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I am an English teacher from the Low Countries. Like everyone else I aspire to one day write a Booker Prize Winner, but until then I contend my self with reading stuff and writing about it. I try to keep the bitchiness to a minimum, but sometimes I can't help myself. In my spare time I enjoy complaining about the weather and sleeping. I lack the attention span for good books and the tolerance for bad ones. I am stuck in literary purgatory. Hey, at least it's warm here. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Zirza's Quick Questions interview.)

Zirza's Reviews:

Resounding Meh.

Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier

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After the death of her mother, twenty three year old Mary Yellan has little choice but to sell off her family’s farm and move in with her sole living relative, Aunt Patience. Mary hasn’t seen her aunt in years and thus has no idea what to expect when she travels to the remote Jamaica Inn, buried deep in the Cornwall Countryside. The coach driver who takes her there tells her the Inn has a bad reputation, but won’t say much more, though Mary soon understands […]

Hit and Miss

Down to the Woods by MJ Arlidge

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Just outside of Southampton, UK, a happy young couple are on a camping trip. Their tent is shabby and worn, but that hardly matters to them: they get drunk, they make out, they fall asleep happy. But when the woman wakes up, she is alone. Her fiancé is gone. She calls out for him, but he doesn’t reply. None of the other campers have spotted him; he appears to have vanished into thin air.  Miles away, the boyfriend is in the middle of the woods, […]

Dwindle, Peak and Pine

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

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Birnam Wood are a collective of idealists. They roam around the New Zealand city in which they are based and grow vegetables on unused plots of lands, occasionally with permission of their owners. People volunteer bits of time and effort, driving around the city looking for mulch or abandoned pieces of plastic tarp to cover the plants, weeding the lots and collecting rainwater. Everything is recycled. Important events are democratically decided during a meeting known as a hui, in deference to the Maori, but ostensibly […]

Sail Away

Sunset by Jessie Cave

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London-based sisters Ruth and Hannah are very close in spite of everything – their difference in age, their difference in outlook on life. Tied together by an upbringing with two selfish, disinterested parents (one actor, one writer, neither of them very successful) they’ve taken two very different paths in life: Hannah is professionally successful, has a loving boyfriend, has started a charity for disadvantaged children, while Ruth is an art-school drop out whose longest relationship is with a man who doesn’t give her the time […]

Game, set and …

The Match by Harlan Coben

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Several decades ago, a young boy was discovered living alone in the woods. The boy was put in foster care; the authorities assumed the boy would eventually be claimed. But no such thing happened. The boy, nicknamed Wilde, grew up and became a… PI? Enforcer? Jack of All Trades in the security business? We don’t know, we don’t care. All we know is that the boy’s memories never came back, save for one: a red banister, a portrait of a man, and the sound of […]

The White Man’s Burden

Trofee by Gaea Schoeters

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Hunter White has one passion in life: hunting. And he’s about to achieve the pinnacle of his favourite hobby: he has purchased a license to shoot a rhinoceros, thereby completing the Big Five, something he has dreamed of since his grandfather took him hunting as a young boy. He considers himself a skilled hunter, someone who respects the craft. No cheesy poses on top of a lion for him, no semi-automatic weapons, no faff. Just him, and the animal. And several local guides, of course, […]



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