Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I don’t wanna ruin my life, but I wanna go home with you.

Counterpoint (Twisted Wishes #2) by Anna Zabo

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An alternative title to this was “Like Hannah Montana, but make it adult, queer, and with a healthy dose of BDSM.” Domino Grinder is a rockstar. With spiked hair, makeup, leather pants, copious tattoos, and a black-lipsticked sneer, he is the guitar god of the rock band Twisted Wishes. As soon as the show is over, Domino removes his makeup, peels off his skintight outfit, and morphs into his true self: nerdy, book-loving, bowtie-and-glasses-wearing twink, Dominic Bradley. Twisted Wishes has gone from radio-favorite-up-and-coming band to […]

North Brooklyn

Greenpoint Brooklyn's Forgotten Past by Gregory Cobb

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: book begins with the letter “G” I worked in Greenpoint for two years and really came to love the area. My grandmother was from east Baltimore, the same east Baltimore featured in John Waters’ Hairspray. Patterson Park, Canton, Dundalk. Those were her stomping grounds. Those neighborhoods featured a glorious mix of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures coming together in a dense rowhouse-packed area. She always spoke fondly of growing up there. Greenpoint gave me a similar feeling, though like most of […]

Two Writers

We Are Watching by Alison Gaylin

Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle

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I finished two books this past week and enjoyed them to varying degrees. One was by a favorite author, another by an author I’ve struggled with in the past. Let’s get to the latter first since I like going in reading order… We Are Watching**** I’ve always felt cold toward Alison Gaylin’s work. She’s a very good writer and yet, there’s an emotional distance in her books that I can’t land with. It’s the same issue I get when watching most Christopher Nolan movies: yeah […]

Unlikable Characters Doing Inexplicable Things

Tell Me Who You Are by Louisa Luna

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The story: Dr. Caroline Strange is a psychiatrist in Brooklyn. She has a very inflated sense of self-worth, believing she knows what’s best for everyone, and gives all of her patients cutesy, cringy, cruel nicknames like Tawdry Twyla and Weepy Jasmine. One morning a new patient arrives, tells her, “I’m going to kill someone, and I know who you really are,” and walks out. This sets off twin storylines, narrated by three different characters–1) Caroline in the present, trying to figure out who this guy […]

Ok I Will

Tell Me Who You Are by Louisa Luna

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: free space. Ok I will get to my thoughts about this book in a second. But… It’s probably been talked about before by folks in other spaces but I find it notable that so many female-written thrillers are based around a woman running away from her past. Could be because of an abusive ex or parents but it is often — as it is here — about a traumatic event that occurred when they were younger. I’m not trying […]

Learn, Baby, Learn

Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco by Richie Narvaez

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Read as part of CBR16Bingo: Disco. The book is set in the 1970s, in New York City, has a prominent theme at a discotheque and has the word “disco” in the title. Imagine if Harriet the Spy was a high school girl of Hispanic descent in 70s Brooklyn and you’d have the vibe of this one. There are two stories here, one about Holly and the other about Xander. I don’t want to spoil them but the dueling narratives do not imply an unlikely friendship. […]



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