Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Beware against the sweet person, for sugar has no nutrition.

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

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My book club picked Vinegar Girl (2016) by Anne Tyler. It had good reviews, and I think everyone was happy that it was a relatively short novel. According to Amazon, Vinegar Girl was a result of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project. The goal was to retell works by William Shakespeare for a more modern audience. Vinegar Girl is a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. I obviously know of The Taming of the Shrew, but I’ve never read it. I’ve heard it has problems with misogyny. However I have seen, and really enjoyed, 10 […]

“We need new songs.”

The Silence of the Girls: A Novel by Pat Barker

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I recently reviewed Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles for CBR12 bingo, and I referred to it as a gateway into a genre I call “reimagined classics” or “classics fanfic”. The Silence of the Girls is yet another outstanding addition to this genre and it happens to overlap with The Song of Achilles, presenting several main characters and incidents from The Iliad from a very different perspective. Pat Barker imagines for us the life of Briseis, a Trojan princess who becomes Achilles’ slave. Through the […]

Misty water-colored memories…. (CBR12Bingo 2: Nostalgia)

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

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So, this book is set in 2011, and I was getting married that year at age 25. Not strictly my teen years. However, I’m counting it for two reasons – 1) 9/11/2001 is key to the plot, when I was an actual sophomore in high school, and 2) though the Harry Potter books exist in this universe, Simon Snow is very very very obviously a Harry Potter analogue, and the penultimate book in that series was released in 2005, when I was in my first […]

A truly awful book to blackout my bingo card!

Mary Bennet and the Bloomsbury Coven by Beth Deitchman

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So, this is another published Pride and Prejudice fanfiction.  I mean, so are all of them I suppose, but even the title screams “fanfic.”  And if I had come across this book with this description online, I would have passed it by.  But a hard copy was handed to me, and so I set out to read it.  So let’s journey together, shall we? *Note – will contain massive spoilers*   It’s bad.  Mary has taken to reading novels instead of more “serious” works, her […]

Not too bad for a first novel!

The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

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To all of those naysayers who say that fanfiction is not legitimate, I present Exhibit A, The Other Bennet Sister, along with all of the other Pride and Prejudice “variations” or alternate stories.  This is what fanfiction is, taking something and putting your own spin on it.  The only difference is that the copyright has passed on P&P, so people can publish their stories, whereas you can’t really do that yet with Harry Potter or The Avengers or whatever.  (Although if you talk to the […]

Every time I read the title of this book, I read it to the tune of “Helpless” from Hamilton

Heartless by Marissa Meyer

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This is a story of Wonderland before it became the broken thing that Alice encounters in the book.  Residents are more or less happy and good natured.  They don’t stay that way, however.  Wonderland is a world of cards, and there are many fun and innocent games you can play with cards.  But there’s another land through the Looking Glass, the land of Chess.  And Chess is a battlefield.  Some things from Chess have come to Wonderland, and they will never be the same.   […]



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