Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules… was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things.”

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Celeste Ng seems to like to write books where it seems like they start with a mystery or crime scene, but the book isn’t really about the mystery. Things don’t get solved. People don’t get closure or absolution. You’re led to the end as a reader, but you feel just as lost as the characters surely do. Here’s the summary bit from Goodreads: In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to […]

“My personal motto has always been if you’ve already dug yourself a hole too deep to climb out of, you may as well keep digging.”

Heretics Anonymous by Katie Henry

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Michael Ausman is seething. His father has uprooted their family yet again for a job promotion — this time Michael was barely two months into his junior year. Now he is faced with making yet another new group of friends in another new school, and to make matters worse, that school is a Catholic one. Michael is an atheist, and he has no interest in setting down any roots lest they be ripped back out again. But on the first day of school, he is […]

#CBR10Bingo: So Popular! – Revisiting a favourite (Bingo #9 and #10)

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#CBR10Bingo: So Popular! This is my second re-read of Attachments. I first read it back in 2011, and my original review can be found here. Considering how much I loved the book back then (and still do), it’s a fairly short and unenthusiastic review. But it’ll give you the basics of what the book is about. When it came to selecting a book for the “So popular!” square, all ten choices (among the most reviewed books of the ten years on the Cannonball blog) were ones I’d already read […]

#CBR10Bingo: Home, Something, Home (double Bingo!)

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#CBR10Bingo: Home, Something, Home (this book is set at Stovner in Oslo, three stops away from where I live on the metro. It also concerns exactly the sort of pupils that I teach.) Two youths, both living in the same tower block in a suburb on the east side of Oslo, in Stovner (where the large majority of inhabitants are immigrants or the children of immigrants). They start out going to the same high school. Starting in the year 2000, the framing device consists of these […]

#CBR10Bingo: Fahrenheit 451 – The Hate U Give

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#CBR10Bingo: Fahrenheit 451 (one of the ten most banned or challenged books in 2017) Starr feels like she’s living two lives, and in a way she is. She goes to a prestigious private school along with her siblings, where they are among the only black students. She has a white boyfriend, who calls her “Fresh Princess”, thinking she’s a bit like Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. She lives in a poor and rough neighbourhood, where drug dealing and gun violence isn’t unusual. Her […]

The book was absolutely NOT better

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#CBR10Bingo: The Book was Better?  Spoiler Warning! This has already been reviewed a ton of times – there will be some vague spoilers, but nothing that should ruin the film or the book for anyone. Rachel Chu is an economics professor in New York. Her boyfriend of two years, Nick Young, a history professor at the same university, invites her to go to Asia with him for the summer, to attend his best friend’s wedding. Rachel has no idea that Nick’s family is one of the wealthiest […]



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