Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I Tried

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles

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I’m going to try and review this book as dispassionately as possible in the beginning. I’ll save my personal comments for the end. Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times writer who now works for The Free Press on Substack, found herself dismayed in the aftermath of lefty uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s death. She’s a liberal, a woman, a lesbian no less and she suddenly found her words and identity out of step with what she saw as progressive overreach. So she attempted to […]

“The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.”

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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I heard good things, great things even, about Louise Erdrich from a few book pals and ya know she also has won a Pulitzer (though not for this book) so I knew I wanted to check her out. I came upon a discounted copy of this book at my local bookstore and Bob’s your uncle I bought the book. Aside: I typed that previous sentence and immediately thought, “Where does the idiom “Bob’s your uncle” even come from?!” A Google search says it’s unclear in […]

Learning to live with the unimaginable – THUG LIFE

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When I try to start this review, I am cowed at the prospect of it. What do I, a mid-30s white woman have to say about Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, the story of Starr Carter, a sixteen year old young black woman growing up in the ghetto, who is a witness to the murder of not one, but two of her friends? What do I have to say about her experience, or about the experience of everyone in this book, so far removed […]

THUG gave me all the feels

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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas deserves all the hype and awards. The story centers around teenager Starr Carter who lives in the African-American community of Garden Heights while attending an expensive private school on the posh side of town. She has two sides of her life, two faces she shows each environment. Her white boyfriend Chris has never met her Dad. Her friend Kenya, who she shares a half-brother with has never met any of her high school friends. The two worlds collide after […]

So. Much. Ugly. Crying.

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Can I just write a four word review?  EVERYONE. READ. THIS. NOW. No?  You need more? Ok fine.   Thomas tells the story through the first-person voice of 16-year old Starr Carter, who is witness to one of her close friends (Khalil, a black teen boy) be killed for no reason by a white police officer.  It’s (sadly) not an unusual story if you’ve turned on the news, like, ever…  but to see it through the eyes of this young girl makes an unthinkable tragedy […]

A debut that deserves all the praise it’s been given.

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I have been trying to figure out what I want to say about this book for literally months now, and I just can’t do it. I give up. The amount of things I want to say are all swirling around in my brain and getting mixed up with each other, and everything is coming out all garbled whenever I try, so I give up and am now officially half-assing this review in a stream of consciousness manner with no regards for structure, and I am no longer […]



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