Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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A country without a language is a country without a soul

The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood by Hugo Hamilton

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The speckled people is a memoir of a childhood in Ireland in the 1950’s, growing up between languages. Hugo’s mother is a german emigrant and his father is an Irish nationalist determined that his children will revive the Irish language. Hugo himself is just a boy who wants to fit in with the other kids – who all speak English. The book is written in a soft language, floating in and out of the memories of a young boy. His father is a brutal tyrant […]

Oh, to be a wayward child…

Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire

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Children have always had a habit of disappearing into different worlds, whether they’ve strayed off a path in the woods or climbed into a wardrobe during a game of hide and seek, but what happens to those children once they come back home? For many of those children, they never wanted to return in the first place. And for the parents of those children, they just want their child to be the one they were before they disappeared, stop talking nonsense about the fairy worlds […]

Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.

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Drumroll…………. It makes its second appearance in my Cannonball Read in as many years. (Here is my review from last year.) But dangit, it’s just absolutely outstanding all over again. Honestly, I might be at a loss for words now, and I think that’s because Stephen King took all of them. All the words. It is so long. But it reads so fast! I can’t put it down, and I don’t want to put it down! It’s just one of those books. So, the timing […]

THE CASE OF THE MISSING NUN WHO WAS KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED (except obviously not)

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I kind of hated reading this . I understand its goals and it had some interesting and touching moments, but was overall a slog to get through. One of many stories of childhood in the 1950s, I don’t think it offered any new point of view on the era. It does have an interesting look into grief and children, specifically losing a parent, but doesn’t dive as deeply into the topic as I wish it would have. The Mutual Admiration Society is made up of young Theresa “Tess” […]

When the night has come

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This, perhaps the most quintessential “Stephen King story” ever written, walks that delicate, liminal space between childhood and adolescence. Here lies the age when perfection exists unrecognized. When you have the friends you’ll always carry with you, regardless of later circumstance. This is the age when childhood has reached its apogee: immediately before the confusion of puberty and the discovery of girls. It is a time for unchecked vulgarity, false bravado and posturing, and the constant interplay and co-mingling of imagination and experience, where the […]

I’m so late to this great party, I almost want to punch something.

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Let the making fun of me begin: I am newly and totally obsessed with Stephen King. Brief backstory: when I was 7 or 8 years old, I started reading “Cujo.” It gave me nightmares: long, scary, repeated nightmares. I never finished it, because No More Stephen King For Me, said my parents. And then, somehow, in my mind, the idea of Stephen King’s writing… well, I guess it morphed from “OMG, that guy is scary” to “Meh, airport reading. Basically the James Patterson of horror.” […]



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