Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“I’m human like everybody else. It’s just that I’m so tired, so worn out, I can’t feel anymore.”

Passing by Nella Larsen

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Passing is about pretense, jealousy, psychological ambiguity, concealment, and duplicity. The messiness of being human s portrayed in the relationship between two women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield. It is through this narrative that Larsen suggests that both racial and gender/sexual identities are as much artifice as they are intrinsic. Larsen is specific in the manner that she portrays her characters. The mechanics of the writing – and its brevity – are significant indicators of the level of craft on display. Larsen is doing big […]

Just a cog in the Prison Industrial Complex

Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman

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Piper Kerman’s memoir was adapted by Netflix as one of its first original content tv shows, with the show arguably overshadowing the book itself. That’s a real shame, as while the show is a great showcase for some diverse female actresses, it lacks the nuance and social issues highlighted by the book. The book chronicles Kerman’s year in a New England prison in the early aughts, roughly 10 years after she committed a drug trafficking offense that led her there. She tells the memoir largely […]

“When a shark offers up a pearl, be wary of its teeth.”

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

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So it looks like after Winter’s Orbit,  I’ve jumped straight into more political fiction! Rather than sci-fi, this one is fantasy, and rather than an empire spanning cluster of planets, we have an empire spanning an archipelago. A sort of fantasy Moluccas, if you will. And while this is not a romance, it does have one of the very cutest animal sidekicks I’ve come across in a long while The empire of The Bone Shard Daughter is ruled by a man who favours tight control […]

Blackout (of a character and on the bingo card)

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

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Cbr14bingo Gaslight/Bingo Blackout  Action takes place during and in decades prior to WWI. A couple of characters struggle to believe the truth and question each other’s reliability. The Return of the Soldier is a novella that exposes the iniquities of Britain’s class system against the backdrop of World War I. It is a heartbreaking love story that focuses on the women in one soldier’s life as he convalesces following an unusual injury in France. This story features four main characters. The injured soldier, Captain Chris […]

The sunshine and the grumpy one – now with added crime!

The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian

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CBR14 Bingo: Gaslight (Marian was lied to and manipulated by the duke, book also set in the Georgian era) Spoiler warning! I’m going to do my best to review this book without spoiling major plot points from The Queer Principles of Kit Webb or this book, but if you want to remain fully unspoiled, you’d probably want to skip this review until you’ve actually read the book. Which you should (read the book, I mean), it’s absolutely marvellous. Marian Hayes, believed to be the Duchess […]



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