Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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if it feels too good to be true…

The Whispering House by Elizabeth Brooks

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THEN IT IS! RUN! Freya, our protagonist, is a willfully clueless horror heroine. Were The Whispering House a movie, we would all be shouting at her every time she was on screen. Don’t open that door! Don’t drink that tea! Don’t go up those stairs! Don’t look behind you! Don’t move in to the crumbling manor house that is somehow connected to your sister’s suicide days after meeting the charming yet off-putting man of the house! Just…DON’T! A blurb on the cover of my ARC states […]

“Everything that happened next was only possible because my mother was absent. It wasn’t that she left the house much, it was that a part of her had abandoned her body and now resisted coming back.”

How to Order the Universe by María José Ferrada

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A precocious child, a beat-up Renault, traveling salesmen and the uneasy promise of ghosts populate this tiny but mighty book. M, our narrator, has struck a deal with her father. They haunt the dusty roads of Pinochet’s Chile as a sales-duo, using M’s charms to sway shop owners towards buy more nails, hammers, and other hardware than her father could sell on his own. If the person in charge focused on my pupils, instead of encountering me, he or she encountered every possible form of […]

“She was probably wearing real Chanel Vamp nail polish, not knockoff Revlon Vixen”

Justine by Forsyth Harmon

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Ali is bored, lonely, and smitten. Justine is bold, aloof, and irresistible. The girls meet in a Long Island Stop & Shop in the summer of 1999. I’ve been quoting from this song a lot lately, but as John Darnielle said so perfectly in “Old College Try”: Things will shortly get completely out of hand There is something visceral about peeking back into the mind of a suburban tri-state-area teen. This book stuck with me like the frequently mentioned feeling of bare thighs sticking to […]

One Woman Holds a Torch for the Three Women Who Kicked Down the Door to War

You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker

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My master’s adviser at the University of Washington had rejected my thesis on the Bangladesh War of Independence after I refused to sleep with him. He said the one was not related to the other but would welcome having an affair if I changed my mind. That infuriating fact  introduces us to Elizabeth Becker. Becker is no stranger to reporting; she has covered revolution, war, and genocide all over the world. She has won many prizes for her work, including (but not limited to the) […]

monologuing at the mouth of madness

The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O'Donnell

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A strong opening pulls us directly into the spooky fold; a seamstress with a secret hurls herself from a very important man’s very high attic window. The House on Vesper Sands has all of the hallmarks of a Victorian throw-back; mazes of manners, decrepit mansions, and gin-soaked police populate a scuzzy world of destitute working girls, complicated family histories, and genteel young men all-aflutter. The Spiritualist movement is in full-swing and a cloaked and creepy group of “Spiriters” may be responsible for a rash of […]

A little rocky on this fake exes hosting a radio show romance novel but I liked it overall.

The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Solomon

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Thanks to Berkeley and Netgalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy. This book and I went on a ride together. It didn’t really gel with me at first, but by the end, there was more of it that charmed me and worked for me than that didn’t. I will definitely read more books from this author going forward. The premise here is that Shay has been a radio producer at a public radio station in Seattle for ten years, and wunderkind Dominic is fresh out of […]



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