Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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He paints like birds sing

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

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This was actually my first Fredrik Backman but quite a few fellow Cannonballers mentioned this novel during one of the Zoom meet ups so I decided it was time to give him a shot (and then got distracted by other books). The story explores two timelines, 25 years apart. The present or later timeline (it’s a bit vague on specifics that would tie either timeline to a specific decade so when I say present, that’s just for simplicity) focuses on Louisa, a teen in foster […]

“Summer went away, still the yearning stays”

It's Not Summer Without You (2010) by Jenny Han

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“Before Jeremiah or anybody else could answer me, I made a run for the sliding doors, and then I stumbled down the steps and sprinted onto the beach. I felt like a flying comet, a streak in the sky, like I hadn’t used my muscles in so long and it felt great to stretch my legs and run. The house, all lit up with people inside, felt a million miles away. I knew he’d come after me. I didn’t have to turn around to know […]

“My boy was a montage”

The Summer I Turned Pretty (2009) by Jenny Han

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This is for the Adapt/Camel cbr14bingo square; the book and its sequels have been adapted into a series on Amazon Prime, and narrator Isabel ‘Belly’ Conklin has to adapt to her changing body and growing up and the things and people she’s taken for granted changing around her. “My boy was a montage / A slow-motion, love potion/ jumping off things in the ocean / I broke his heart cause he was nice”, sings Taylor Swift on ‘Midnight Rain’, the sixth track of her new album. […]

‘The ocean was exactly as she’d imagined it’

Summer Sisters (1998) by Judy Blume

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CBR14 BINGO square: Shadow. (Holiday would be too easy.) Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters (1998) is a mood, a vibe, an energy, rather than a novel. It’s the salty taste of chips (or fries) and the soft sweetness of ice cream and the sharp chill of a vodka and cranberry with ice. It’s a long slow afternoon by the shore, a long slow stare into the shadows of the past. It’s strawberry lipgloss and windblown hair and new yellow swimsuits and singing along to ABBA and holding […]

“Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown”

Paper Towns (2008) by John Green

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When I was in high school at the turn of the century, while too young for bars and too old and cool for McDonalds, some friends and I would sit cross-legged on the platform between railway tracks at the train station of our town and play ‘pulse murder’. This was a game where you sat in a circle, and held hands, and one person was the murderer (I forget how they were assigned), and sent a number of squeezes, or pulses, around the circle. If […]



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