Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I really want to go to the Dark Forest at Sugar Fair – why does it have to be fictional?

Battle Royal by Lucy Parker

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I absolutely adored Lucy Parker’s London Celebrities series and was excited to get my hands on the first book in her next series, Battle Royal. How could I not be excited for a book where the introduction to our protagonists involves a confectionary unicorn hoof hitting one of them on the forehead mid-judging of a televised baking competition?

After that first meeting four years ago Sylvie Fairchild has gone on to open her own bakery, Sugar Fair, across the street from Dominic De Vere’s eponymous shop. She (and her business) is all things fantastical while De Vere’s is much more classic in its aesthetic (Sylvie describes his color palette as ranging from white to cream). The television show where Dominic is a judge and Sylvie is a former contestant is in need of a new third judge, and Sylvie is tapped for the job as one of their most popular former contestants with a successful baking business. Dominic and Sylvie are thrown together during filming, and they are both in the process of trying to land the contract to create the wedding cake for the King’s eldest granddaughter whose aesthetic is much more in line with Sylvie’s, but Dominic’s family bakery has been the go-to for decades.

What I love about this book is that while a good synopsis I’ve just written, it covers almost nothing of the core of the story. Sure, it gives you the beats of the plot (mostly, this book has a lot of plot) but it doesn’t really give you the heart of the story. For the life of me, I’m struggling to review the heart of the book forty-eight hours out from having finished it. While Sylvie and Dominic are presented as opposites and rivals, they are much more kindred spirited than is initially evident. Parker does what she does best, she slowly but surely layers in depth to her characters and provides them with deep inner lives. Watching how Dominic is surprised, but not all that surprised, at how natural it feels to let Sophie in was one of my happiest reading moments of the year because it rang so honest.

One of the things I’ve been grousing about in other reviews is the un-needed third act break up. It is my contention that while there often needs to be a tension point to be released, it doesn’t always need to come in the form of a break-up or large, boisterous fight. Battle Royal does a great job of proving my point for me. Something happens in Sylvie’s life that makes her nervous about how fast and how deep her feelings for Dominic have developed and with that added to her personal scars surrounding death and loss makes her step back emotionally. Dominic gives her the space she needs to work through whatever it is, and once he’s called back to action by Sylvie’s friend and coworker, he waits for Sylvie to explain what’s happening, giving her the space to do so even while it makes him scared that she might be pulling away full stop. This is the tension point of the story: she has to be open to what truly feeling might cost, he has to be open to the vulnerability of truly letting someone in and the events of the 80% mark do that without making it a fight between them. That was the moment I decided I was rounding this one up to 5 stars.

Content warnings for: discussion of grief (death of family members, including a memory of a death scene in a hospital), parental neglect of child (memory), attempted knife attack.

I was granted an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Bingo Square: Libations (cakes, confections, absinthe, its all here.)

As a side note, did anyone else get the mental image of these two while reading about Rose and Johnny? Just me?

Hotel Transylvania Mavis Wallpapers - Wallpaper Cave

There was no other way I could go with the Self Care BINGO square than by reviewing a fanfic. #CBRBINGO – Self Care

Dan Westchester, Hello Kitty Enthusiast by violue

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Link to the story on AO3: Dan Westchester, Hello Kitty Enthusiast

Firstly, if you are not familiar with fanfic (which I hope is not many of you, because it is a true pleasure to indulge in) many fics have individual titles but are part of a series that also has a title. I’ve used the series title for this one, Dan Westchester, Hello Kitty Enthusiast, because it makes me laugh, and because I honestly think it’s a better title than part one of the fic, which I am reviewing here, which is actually called The Unwavering Heart of a Winchester. (Part two is just a small vignette that follows up on the main story months later.)

Also, yes, this is Supernatural fanfiction. Yes, it is Dean/Castiel. Me of a year ago would not have believed you on either count. But in October of last year it made all the pop culture news sites that the show, in it’s third to last episode, actually had Castiel (an angel of the Lord) confess his love to one of the series leads, Dean Winchester. This of course set the internet on fire. Would the CW actually let these two be gay together? (Sadly, no.) But for two weeks things were cheerful! And I got curious. For some reason, for years, I’ve had a bee in my bonnet about this series and refused to watch it. (Also, it’s so long! It’s fifteen full seasons! I’m on season thirteen currently and I have been watching since late October.) But I gave in. And started reading the fics. I actually started in on the fanfics three full seasons before Castiel even made his appearance (in episode one of season four). I was just too excited to read about the pansexual wavelength of celestial intent falling in love with the bisexual monster hunter. (Misha Collins, who plays Castiel, has been playing his character for years as if he were in love with Dean.)

Anyway, so I’ve read a metric shit ton of fanfics by now, and this is one of my favorites that I’ve read since October in this fandom. (violue also wrote another of my favorites, The Way to a Man’s Heart is Through Chlamydia, which is another AU (alternate universe) about how they get together because one of them gives the other chlamydia after a one night stand, and it’s actually just really sweet and funny and fluffy.) So when one of the Read Harder challenges this year was to “Read a Fanfic” I literally laughed out loud. I wrote on my little Read Harder checklist, “LOL which one”. But after I read this one, I knew I had a winner. (And a Self Care square.)

As mentioned previously, this is an AU in which there is no supernatural, and nobody has powers, and everybody is human and not a demon/angel/prophet/whatever. I’m just going to quote the blurb on the fic to sum up the premise:

There’s no point in mincing words. Sam is dead, and without him Dean is a drunken shell of who he used to be. When he finally pulls himself out of a growing pile of whiskey bottles, Dean finds it hard to go back to his life. With one flippant comment from a friend, Dean thinks he might finally have a way to make peace with the loss; Sam was an organ donor, and Dean’s going to find the recipients, talk to them, and see how their lives are better because of his little brother. For the first six stops on his road trip, things go mostly according to plan, and then he meets the man who has Sam’s heart. Dean had hoped he might find peace on this trip . . . he never expected to find love.

A large portion of this fic is just Dean coming to terms with the loss of his younger brother, who he also basically raised. I think there’s a special, terrible kind of grief that comes with losing someone so central to your life, and here Sam is Dean’s best friend, his brother, and in many ways, a child to him. Dean completely falls apart. It’s one of the rawest depictions of grief I’ve read anywhere, not just in fanfic. But there’s such a humanity to this fic, because the author gives Dean companions in his grief, and people who love him trying to take care of him, even when he doesn’t want the help. He takes solace in his brother’s girlfriend, Ruby, who was in the car accident with Sam when he was killed. She doesn’t fall apart the way Dean does, but they become closer because of their shared grief, and form this funny, weird friendship even though they weren’t very close when Sam was alive. A present she gives Dean as a joke becomes the inspiration for the title, as she gives him a Hello Kitty sweatshirt, and he wears it constantly, in public. The other part of the title comes once Dean starts his road trip to find the people whose lives Sam’s organs saved/helped. He goes by the alias Dan Westchester, because he’s clever like that.

Cas doesn’t even come in to the story until like a third of the way through, and it doesn’t even matter because Dean’s journey is so emotionally satisfying. The premise could have been icky and super cheesy, falling in love with the guy who got your brother’s heart, but the author handles it beautifully. It was also important to me that Dean’s relationship with Cas not “fix him”. Dean moves through his grief regardless of meeting Castiel, and there’s this wonderful satisfaction of seeing Dean heal and come to terms with Sam’s death, even as he remains sad that it happened. violue also uses the secondary characters so incredibly well, and once again shows their talent for dialogue and humor amidst other complicated emotions. So many clever, small little details really fill in the world these characters live in.

Highly recommend this fic, and honestly, you could read it never having seen an episode of the show. It’s just a good, sweet story.

The fic that I almost chose instead was one of the first I read, because it’s a classic, and that’s A Room of One’s Own by NorthernSparrow (who is an ornithologist in real life, and it shows, and they also wrote this epic fic set in Alaska on a research site called Under the Midnight Sun), but ultimately I chose this one because of its accessibility. A Room of One’s Own is now one of my all-time favorite fics, but it does take place within the canon of the show, so familiarity with Supernatural is more necessary to really get all the nuances.

The art I’ve posted here is from the great Winchester-Reload, and has no relation to any of the fics. I just couldn’t find any cover art or fan art of this particular fic, which is a real shame, so I chose a couple of my favorites.

Read Hard Challenge 2021: Read a fanfic.

CBR BINGO: Self Care

Year of Penny? EXCUSE ME, LIFE of Penny!

The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson

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5/26 UPDATE: if you are curious and want to check out an excerpt, you can do so HERE!

Do you miss Happy Endings? If you have seen the show, then the answer is obviously YES SO MUCH OH MY GOODNESS PLEASE COME BACK! If you have not seen the show, then what are you doing? Get out of here and inject all three seasons directly into your eyeballs before returning!

Several days ago, the unfortunately canceled Happy Endings turned 10. 10! It seems like just yesterday, Alex was ditching Dave at the altar for a man in rollerblades. Several days ago, another wonderful thing happened: Casey Wilson, Penny of Happy Endings fame, released this collection of essays.

Wilson, a writer and actress who has worked on everything from Bride Wars through Black Monday, is an absolute delight. She is furiously honest; she does not care how you see her in the end, as she is going to tell you THE TRUTH and maybe that truth will help you along the way! Should it not, getting it all out may help her in the long run, too.

Wilson lost her mother unexpectedly about 15 years ago. She struggles with this loss every day, and she is refreshingly vulnerable. I do not know what it is like to feel that sort of incredible loss, but there are many other ways in which I saw myself in her: her obsession with candy, her attempts to break into show biz, her go-to of meeting all challenges with pure rage, and her tendency to buy COMPLETELY into all sorts of miracle fix-its that come her way. She is candid with her honesty, and while that often leads to hysterical moments of she and her husband throwing a beach towel over their bed so they can eat dinner in peace (hello, I have done that), sometimes it leads to her messy and complicated relationships with the world around her.

I did not always agree with her, but I will always support her ability to say and do what she needs to say and do. She comes from an incredible place of privilege, and she acknowledges that fact throughout, but her struggles with motherhood, addiction, grief, and rage are universal- she just has ways of helping to cope that most of us may never be able to access.

If you are not familiar with Casey to begin with, then I do not know if this is the book for you, but if you love irreverent but honest comedy and you lament the loss of Happy Endings every time you turn on your TV, then give yourself a treat and check out the audio version of The Wreckage of My Presence. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll be delighted when you figure out that one of the ex-boyfriend Pauls she talks about is PAUL RUST!

“You need to find the story that means something to you”

Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher

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Amelia UnabridgedI love when covers match the book’s contents, don’t you? That gorgeous cover is basically what the book is about, complete with flying whales, late nights reading in a bookstore, and a lost-looking young adult trying to figure out life. It’s heart-wrenching and lovely and I cried way more times than I want to admit.

“Do you want to talk about it?”
I would have been less surprised if the stone lion sitting outside the fancy restaurant across the street had opened its massive jaws and made the same offer, but I managed to mumble, “No, thank you.”
“Good,” Jenna said. “There are too many books and not enough time as it is.”

Amelia met her best friend Jenna the day her father left to start a new family. Her mom struggled to cope, so Amelia basically became folded in to Jenna’s family and they became as close as sisters. They bonded over their love of the Orman book series, where each girl picked one of the protagonists – sisters who are warring over who’s the rightful queen to Orman, a fairytale land somewhat like Narnia – to identify with. As their high school graduation present, they’re going to a con to meet the reclusive N. E. Endsley, the author of the Orman books. At the convention, they separate temporarily before the panel where he will be speaking. When Amelia returns, it’s to find out that the author’s cancelled his appearance. She’s devastated, and even more so when Jenna tells her that she spoke to him before he left. Amelia’s mad, but they partially reconcile before Jenna leaves for a trip to Ireland. And then, she dies in a car accident. Amelia’s left unmoored, until she receives a package from a bookstore she’s never heard of before: a mysterious special edition of the first Orman book. Convinced it’s some sort of sign from Jenna, Amelia hatches a plan to visit the bookstore. But what she finds there is even more unexpected.

“I’ve lived in books. I’ve eaten and breathed books for so long that I took it for granted. I assumed that, if they saved me once, they would always be there to pick me up, even if Jenna wasn’t.
But Jenna is gone, and the words stay on the page in their neat, orderly rows. The pages don’t rise up to meet me like old friends, and the characters are marionettes pulled by visible strings.”

I loved what we saw of Jenna, at both the beginning of the book and through Amelia’s recollections of her, and it was achingly clear how much of a loss this was for Amelia. Jenna was closer to a sister than a best friend, and Amelia was content to follow along with Jenna’s plans. Jenna always had a plan, and she even made a giant spreadsheet to figure out what college would be best for both of them to attend. But with Jenna gone, Amelia’s stuck – Jenna’s parents seem to expect that she’ll continue with the life Jenna planned out for them, but Amelia is less sure. The trip to mysterious bookstore is a chance for her to temporarily escape their expectations and try to figure out what she wants to do. As for the bookstore and the people there, it’s hard to talk too much about that without spoiling too much of the book. I loved Nolan and Alex’s friendship, I loved Wally and his insane enthusiasm, and I loved Val and her absolutely magical bookstore. They each felt like real people, by turns suspicious and then gradually accepting of Amelia’s presence.

“And, like that, the stories have come back to me. They are sitting in my throat, working their way into my bones, my blood, the tips of my hair. They are altered, like me. Parts I skimmed before now seem desperately important, and parts I thought were vital, less so.
I am different, but like the stories, I will hold up to more readings, even if those readings are drastically changed in my after.”

The writing is lyrical and at times whimsical, but it doesn’t shy away from the hard bits either. It’s an absolutely heart wrenching exploration of life-changing grief, about navigating your path as you go from the Before to the After, and reuniting your life around a missing piece. There’s a definite emphasis on good things coming from bad things: that this doesn’t make those things wrong, that how you honor those missing pieces can be different for each person. It’s also deeply passionate about how important stories are to people and how stories help us work through our own lives. I wish I’d had this book when I was a teen.

“There are a hundred thousand ways to tell a story,” he begins. “Medical students help people live longer and continue their own stories. Engineering majors tell a story of technology that goes back to cavemen with rocks and sticks. Marine biologists piece together shreds of plot until they know where whales sleep at night and where fish live in coral reefs. Everything is a story, not just writing. You need to find the story that means something to you, a story you like telling.”

As for cons, the worst I can say is that it’s a bit fantastical, in terms of some of the events and how quickly the romantic relationship progresses. But the perfection of the writing and the emotions on the page is hard to argue with, and I think any reader will be able to see themselves, at least a little, in Amelia’s love of books.

Overall, this is an easy 4.5 stars, and possibly one that I’ll bump up to 5 after a reread, because this is definitely a book I expect to reread.

When Langston Found Langston

Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome

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Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome is an interesting look at the late 1940s, Chicago, growing up and literature that was way too short. I would have enjoyed more of the history of the time and seen a bigger connection to the two people called Langston.

Still, I enjoyed what I read but, like I said, there needed to be more: more of the history of the times (Why were the black families moving north? Why were the soldiers were coming back? Even the fact that the father has time off from work but still afraid of losing his job?), seeing the father decide to make the decision to leave Alabama and move north, and of course more about Langston’s mother and the family left behind (he did not seem to have a connection to his grandmother, but then BOOM! he does), more about the dynamic between his father and Langston (we do get a little bit, but they why behind the father’s actions to keep things from Langston, the why he seems not to be into Langston’s extra reading). And, on top of it, there were places that did not need to be there. (Slight spoiler): the next-door neighbor of Langston and his father is a nice-looking woman. Langston mentions how the men in the street will ogle here, but then Langston remarks his father is looking the same way at here. It would have been nice having the father showing a bit of respect towards the character.

The story, however, is relatable. Not only are we seeing Langston deal with the death of his mother (off “screen”), we see him dealing with the bullies of school (and then, how adults will bully his father similarly) and we see him finding the one thing that brings him comfort in a new, literally cold, city: finding the library and the freedom it gives him not just as a black person (a library that is for “coloreds” too) but as he is trying to find the words for his grief.

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the book is that the language of the time is used. Words like colored and Negro to express the people of the community. Of course, it is all “family friendly” (there is not out and out racism but hinted at) even with the “country vs city” biases. I did like that a few historical events are mentioned (The Port Chicago Disaster) but not explained fully. That goes back to the “need more context/more about the history.

This is a good book but has a few bumps for me. Ages (strong) 8 to 13-14 might be the best audience.

The found family narrative works better than the romance

Love at First by Kate Clayborn

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3.5 stars
Disclaimer! I got this book as an ARC from NetGalley. That has in no way influenced my review.
Sixteen years ago, Will Stirling first cast eyes on Nora Clarke and was instantly smitten. He was standing under a shaded tree, listening with a sinking heart to his mother pleading with the uncle he hadn’t even realised existed, while she was up high on a balcony, throwing little tomatoes at thieving squirrels.
Cut to the present day, when Will is an overworked doctor and has inherited his uncle’s apartment. With the exception of seeing his intriguing mystery girl in the garden, he has nothing but bad memories associated with the place and he doesn’t like the run-down building or location. The terms of his late uncle’s will states that he can’t sell the place for the first year, but he’s planning on having it modernised and put up for short-term rentals, so he can go on with his life.
Nora Clarke and the other residents of the building where Will has inherited are appalled when they realise that Will wants nothing to do with the place, and is going to use his unit as a rental. Nora is still grieving for her grandmother, whose apartment she inherited and now lives in, having barely changed a thing since her dear Nonna was alive. Having always had a safe haven in the building, and feeling a strong sense of kinship with the other long-time residents, Nora can’t understand why Will wouldn’t want to be enveloped by their quirky community. She and the other owners decide to try to sabotage Will’s efforts as much as they can.
As it turns out, of course, Nora and Will have a lot in common. Both grew up with distant and preoccupied parents, the difference was that Nora had a loving grandmother and the other residents in her Chicago apartment building. Will had no one else and was completely orphaned in his late teens. He’s used to having to fend for himself, putting himself through college and medical school through hard work and dedication. He’s never had any long-term relationships and seems frankly baffled by the many slightly off-beat traditions that the residents of his uncle’s apartment building seem attached to. He’s very attracted to Nora, though, even more so after he discovers that she is, in fact, the same person he saw on that balcony all those years ago.
Full review on my blog.


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