Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Gossip, Judgement and Destruction – Read this Book

Good People by Patmeena Sarit

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Are we not all outsiders to another person’s life?   Mesmerizing Debut Novel  The novel’s unique structure lacks traditional chapters, paragraphs or narrator. Instead there are 1-2 page personal accounts, giving a 360 degree view of the leadup and the aftermath of one family’s tragedy. I had read about one-third of the book before even learning how somebody died but yet still did not know who had died. There are dozens of unreliable narrators with differing degrees of closeness. Sympathetic words mask superiority, scorn, prejudice […]

The Boy on the moon

Lunar Boy by Jes and Cin Wibowo

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I am starting my review of Lunar Boy with: I have questions. None are about the story itself, which is, a child from the Moon is adopted by a woman from New Earth. They live on a space station until the mother, in the process of helping her New Earth friend deal with the death of his wife, falls in love, marries, and moves to New Earth. Then, Indu (the child) must deal with not just the stress of a move to a new home, […]

Watch out for pesky sisters running away and open graves to the underworld

Graveyard Shakes by Laura Terry

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I have mentioned before the fun thing about working in a bookstore is that you never know what you will find to read. I was waiting for a report to send (takes about 15 minutes) and instead of trying to find actual work, I picked up a book on our return shelf (sadly, yes unsold books must go back to the vendors) and in that 15 minutes I was over half way through Graveyard Shakes by Laura Terry. My first thought was, “I like these […]

Growing Up Is Hard Even Without LSD

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This book takes place in the late 1960s, around the summer of love.  I wasn’t around then, so I’m sure that a lot of my ideas of that time are influenced by popular culture.  This isn’t one of those books that glamorizes that era, but seems to exist solely in between the two worlds of structured society and drug-saturated counterculture. The protagonist is Evie, a girl that would be described as “fourteen going on thirty.”  Evie is a bit of an outsider in her own […]

Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.

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In the Cannonball Read Facebook group, someone awesome posted an article called “The best books of 2016 list you get when you combine 36 “Best Books of 2016” lists.” The Girls is 6th on that list, appearing in 10 of the 36 “Best Books of 2016” lists combined for the “ultimate list.” It’s okay. Here’s what it has going for it: it’s completely real. Here’s what it has against it: it’s not new. The Girls is the story of an older woman reminiscing about that […]

I went to the library and checked out a book because I was getting scared.

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I just reviewed Becky Albertalli’s “Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda” and I’m not going to lie, I was reading “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” at the same time, and sometimes I had trouble telling the difference between them. And I mean that with every compliment, because, as I wrote in my “Simon” review, there’s a strong and important tradition of novels that normalize the alienation of adolescence, and the millions of forms that it can take. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is […]



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