Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

*Such* a weird book, but I could not look away from it.

Identitti by Mithu Sanyal

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 4 Book 24/30 A German professor who has been passing as Indian for her entire adult life is found to have been born white, and because she has placed herself in the public eye and has become a pop culture figure/icon, controversy explodes. (The author was inspired by the cases of people like Rachel Dolezal—who gets a couple mentions in the book—to write a story engaging with a fictional and heightened version of that story.) We see through the […]

Emmalita was right – this is great!

What is Love? by Jen Comfort

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CBR16 Bingo: Games Straight-laced university professor Teddy Ferguson has had a record-long stint of victories on the popular trivia game show Answers! when his confidence and entire existence are rocked by the appearance of the beautiful and confident Maxine Hart. She ruins his pre-show ritual by eating a specific doughnut by stealing it directly in front of him, taking one bite and then throwing it in the trash. One very memorable kiss and the fact that Maxine completely obliterates him on the game show means […]

Trans and Transitions

Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: liberate. Carlotta is coming home from prison, which is some sort of liberation and she’s trying to find her way as a trans woman in the world, seeking her own path to liberation. I’ve written before about my beef with contemporary writing and how smarmy it’s become. Every villain has to twirl their mustache, every hero has to overcome a specific obstacle to warm the audience’s heart, everything is so boringly Manichaean. There’s little space for complexity, imperfection, growth, […]

Beautiful, harrowing and oh so sad

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

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CBR16 Bingo: Liberate (our protagonists are fighting in World War I to keep the world safe from the Germans) Official plot summary, because I finished this book in early April: It’s 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they’re too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle – an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, […]

“Not everyone in our acquaintance needs to be murdered, Veronica. In fact, some people find it preferable to make friends with normal folk.”

A Grave Robbery by Deanna Raybourn

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This is book 9 in an ongoing series, and as such, not the best place to start. Start with A Curious Beginning. Official plot summary (because it’s been too long since I read the book): Lord Rosemorran has purchased a wax figure of a beautiful reclining woman and asks Stoker to incorporate a clockwork mechanism to give the Rosemorran Collection its own Sleeping Beauty in the style of Madame Tussaud’s. But when Stoker goes to cut the mannequin open to insert the mechanism, he makes […]

This one goes to a pretty dark place

Vicious: A Novel (Villains Book 1) by V.E. Schwab

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Cbr16bingo Part 1 This is the second novel I’ve read recently that deals with heroes and villains, and with the notion that “heroes” are actually pretty terrible people. Hench was a great read, and I was immediately sucked in to Vicious, too. In both stories, the “bad guys” actually are the people who seem to have a better sense of what is the right thing to do, but they still aren’t completely good people. This is a pretty dark novel and absolutely not for the […]



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