Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the Yay for YA Discussion About YA Books Now  

cbr12bingo – Yellow (and the close of a ten-part series)

Stop in the Name of Pants! by Louise Rennison

Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? by Louise Rennison

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Well friends, we have come to the end of my re-adventures with the misadventures of Miss Georgia Nicolson! I thought, incorrectly of course, that it would be a fight to finish this series. I bought it during an “online shopping under the influence” session, and I thought that it would be a bit of a laugh down memory lane- but one that ended far short of the destination. When the ten-book set bounced onto my porch one morning, my first thought was “what have I […]

My First Rainbow Rowell

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

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CBR12 BINGO: Nostalgia? For the Nostalgia BINGO square, I googled “books set in the 80s” and Eleanor & Park came up. Having seen many positive reviews for Rainbow Rowell on CBR, I decided to get it from my local library (hooray for curbside pickup!). Young Adult isn’t my usual genre. While I always appreciate good storytelling and can admire an author’s attempts to create characters that are relatable to teens, I rarely love a young adult novel. I can enjoy YA, but I’m not often […]

Desperate for answers, I tore through this book – and then there were no answers.

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

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Desperate for answers, I pretty much blocked out the world to finish this book as fast as I could – and then there were no answers. Susan Choi as an author is a neutral higher power who knows what you want and then calmly chooses not to give it to you, leaving you spinning in place and trying dumbly to figure out what on earth just happened. “Think, use your brain, you’ve got this.” This makes it sound like I disliked the book. I did […]

Common High School Tropes But Stays Classy about Anxiety

Komi Can't Communicate, vols. 1-2 by Tomohito Oda

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This is kind of a two-fer. I’ve seen some reviews or ads for Komi Can’t Communicate, so when I saw the first two volumes at a library, I felt I had to try them. The premise is actually a little interesting, which strikes me as a little unusual for a manga about high school kids in a non-fantasy setting. Tadano wants to get through high school without drawing attention. Komi is the school beauty queen. One would expect for them to connect because that’s just […]

Welcome to the funhouse

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

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Others have and will review this better than I can, but what the heck, i’ll take a stab at it. This book seems to inspire either intense love or intense hate and not much in between based on the reviews at goodreads. However, it won lots of prizes and was on several “best of” lists, so i gave it a shot. And my final verdict? An impressive high wire act that is a chore to read. The author has finely crafted a work of metafiction, […]

Fun tale of female revenge

The Swallows by Lisa Lutz

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I found this book to be a fun revenge tale that both stoked my feminist rage fires and provided an outlet for my anger. It was fun to read; while I didn’t love the resolution of the story, I liked the book overall. The book is set in a high school, where the boys rate the girls on their technique of a specific sex act. There are several different “types” of guys and girls represented in the book: the “good” guy who doesn’t like what’s […]



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