Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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All of Us as in 4 of 7 Villains

All of Us Villains by Amanda Food, Christine Lynn Herman

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I saw a blurb somewhere describing All of Us Villains as ‘the Hunger Games with magic’; that’s accurate, but I think this one is more. The premise is that recently a book has leaked a lot of information about a local secret to the press: once a generation, the seven leading families in Ilvernath select a champion to compete in a tournament to decide who gets to control the scant magical resources for the upcoming generation. Basically the only way to win is to kill […]

Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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When I heard that Suzanne Collins was writing a prequel to the Hunger Games, I was excited. What would we get to see? Haymitch’s times in the arena? A view into another district? The times before the war? There were so many exciting possibilities to choose from. When I found out it would be about a young President Snow, I was disappointed. We don’t really need to know more about him because we know he is the worst, and we don’t really need to hear […]

How to wrestle some success from a dress, a snake and a song.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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CBR12 BINGO: Green Square A book about the making of a narcissistic, ruthless and calculating leader is either the most perfect book to be reading right now or the worst. I really can’t decide. In Collins’ prequel to her Hunger Games series, the games are pretty primal. The district tributes aren’t all dolled up, given a backstory, housed in elaborate apartments or fed extravagant buffets. They are kept in a cage at the zoo until they are dumped into a war torn arena to duke it out. […]

If you can’t beat em, make em bleed like pigs

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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Bingo category: Book Club (a whole bunch of them) The prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has a young Coriolanus Snow, the future president and villain of the first three books, as its protagonist. I didn’t really want to read it because. . . President Snow sucks. But I requested from my library anyway, just to see what I thought. And here we are. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes place 64 years before The Hunger Games trilogy […]

A Welcome Addition To YA Dystopias

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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Were we all a little burned out on dystopic YA fiction for a while there? Yeah, and the movie studios sure didn’t help. Yet here in 2020, something about a pandemic has made dystopic fiction that is specifically YA a lot more appealing though, so who better to reignite my interest in the genre than Susanne Collins herself? Did I get so obsessively into the Hunger Games trilogy back in ’12 that I neglected to finish my Masters thesis on time and had to take […]

A Snarky but Serious Look at Pop Culture

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

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Bingo 7 (The Collection) for the diagonal L to R, top to bottom BINGO! I have had Bad Feminist on my physical TBR shelf for some time. I was motivated to read it for the Bingo square, but also because I’m writing a course syllabus for this fall in which I am considering including a section from Bad Feminist. I figure, if I’m going to teach it, I should know the whole thing for context. I have heard a lot about Roxane Gay as a […]



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