Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“In my shoes, a walking sleep / And my youth I pray to keep”

Heatstroke (2020) by Hazel Barkworth

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Heatstroke (2020) is clever–cleverer than its cover, certainly cleverer than its title. I remember that the review blurbs on the covers of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (2006) and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me (2012) signposted how terrifying teenaged girls can be–and this is certainly a thing, the way teenage girls are inscribed with contradictions of power and anxiety, and Heatstroke does deal with that–but I remember thinking, well, it’s actually the mother that is fairly fucking monstrous in Sharp Objects, and parental figures are pretty absent […]

The anger is palpable, but so is the sorrow

All My Rage: A Novel by Sabaa Tahir

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This YA novel was published in 2022 and won a National Book Award. It contains many difficult themes and triggers, including: racism, physical abuse, drug use/addiction/overdose, trauma, death and grief, The main characters/narrators in All My Rage are Noor, Salahudin and his mother Misbah. They live in a small desert community in Juniper California, near a military base that employs many in the town. Noor and Salahudin are high school seniors who have been friends since they were little, but when the story opens, near […]

A Love So Powerful You Remake the World For Them

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

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Alice Scott is a celebrity journalist who is about to interview for the job of a lifetime. She managed to track down Margaret Ives, an heiress from the Golden Age of Hollywood who vanished from the public eye more than 20 years ago. Margaret agreed to meet with Alice to discuss them potentially working together on an authorized biography of the former media darling. But Alice discovers she’s not the only one up for the job. Hayden Anderson, a music journalist whose first book won […]

Unburied Gays vs Hollywood

Bury Your Gays by Tingle, Chuck

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Chuck Tingle probably needs no introduction, although I’ve been surprised. His book will get one. Bury Your Gays is a horror novel that is too long to be a novela, but it’s not long. I hope it will one day be an early Tingle horror, but for now it’s just one of his few traditionally published non-eroticas. Misha, a successful Hollywood queer horror author, has been ordered to kill his queer coded characters if they have a gay kiss on TV – because of the […]

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

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This took a little bit to get going, but once it did, I was not able to put it down until I finished it. I loved this book from beginning to end and I just didn’t want it to end. I thought Bardugo’s writing and just lyricism with certain words was fantastic. And this book did a great job of blending history, fantasy, and religion together. “The Familiar” follows Luzia Cotado, a scullion living in Madrid during Spain’s “Golden Age.” Luzia has dreams though she […]

The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript by Author Unknown

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The Voynich Manuscript is a famously untranslated work. I purchased a reproduction from The Galobart Books, who make high quality parchment recreations of famous works. In terms of what I read, there’s some companion work to this, but the real appeal is the opportunity to just peruse a work that otherwise only exists in a museum. I first found out about this manuscript from a Cracked.com article a million years ago. I’m going to see if I can embed the content of that article into […]



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