Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Light and dark, light and dark, like a door opening and closing”

Weathering by Lucy Wood

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Lucy Wood’s 2015 debut novel Weathering is stunning and homely; it simultaneously feels like a chilly walk in the rain and a cup of tea by a fireside. It’s a non-scary story about ghosts, and a scary story about loneliness and memory; it’s a story about rivers and birds and photographs and family. Ada is a single mother with a bright but complicated small daughter called Pepper and an even more difficult relationship with her own mother Pearl, recently deceased but not gone. (This isn’t […]

“All her streets obscure / Sparkle and swarm with nothing true nor sure,”

The Town in Bloom by Dodie Smith

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This is another review in the vein of “I love the author but I quite like this book”. In this case, more specifically, it’s “I love a book by this author so much that its inky veins somehow run in mine, that I read it once a year at least and every time I notice something new, that its phrasing and insight sometimes shapes how I see a particular kind of landscape, or light, or expression on a face”–but this book I’m reviewing is not […]

“You have epiphanies all the time. They just don’t have any effect.”

Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

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I love Carrie Fisher’s performance in the original Star Wars films, and in The Force Awakens; her eyes in particular slew me. It was her appearance on 30 Rock, however, and her sharp, wild and funny chat show appearances on Conan and The Graham Norton Show, as well as her comments on Hollywood, that made me want to read her books. I began with Postcards from the Edge (1987). It’s very good. It’s a fragmented sort of narrative that reflects its title; it begins with […]

“The next steps are dizzying”

Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom by Catriona McPherson

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This is the third Dandy Gilver novel of Catriona McPherson’s series that I have reviewed for Cannonball Read; they seem to be pleasingly coming out yearly, and towards the end of one year and around the beginning of the next, I begin to keep an eye out for them at my local library. The new Dandy Gilver is a seasonal pleasure I vaguely look forward to, like Christmas pudding, or not having hayfever. However, I’m beginning to wonder if this routine is such a good […]

they discern/what equilibrium they can recover

Carol (also published as The Price of Salt) by Patricia Highsmith

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Well, it’s not like Cate Blanchett would choose to star in the adaptation of a bad Patricia Highsmith novel. I haven’t actually seen the film, but the trailers and still photographs project a certain sort of aesthetic that I found intriguing–rich colours, gleaming cocktails, and soft lights; crisp coral lipstick on a smile that says come hither and f**k off. This is the first novel of Highsmith’s that I’ve read; as Val McDermid points out on the cover of my edition, it has “the drive […]

Sire, the night is darker now / And the wind blows stronger

Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story by J. Jefferson Farjeon

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Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (1937) exploits seasonal chill to the max on every possible level. It’s cold, neck-deep in snow–and there might be ghosts or other unearthly things hiding in the shadowy whiteness. The story begins conventionally enough, with a group of strangers stuck on a train that’s stuck in a snowdrift. One of them, an elderly man who seems to know a lot about the paranormal, and the traces left on the present by violent or highly emotionally-charged events of the […]



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