Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.”

Turtles All The Way Down by John Green

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How is it that a middle-aged man is able to express the inner workings of an anxious teenage girl so well? The only writing I know is to “write what you know”, so it always blows me away when authors are able to so skilfully step into the shoes of the unfamiliar. In “Turtles All The Way Down”, John Green has captured my heart again. Reading this novel is like stepping into a time machine: when your Mom is like a loving but frustrating alien, […]

“The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.”

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

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I’ve read a lot of YA the last few weeks and constantly found myself comparing them to the YA master, John Green, so the natural next step was to reread some Green’s books. I really enjoyed Turtles All the Way Down when I read it the first go around during CBR9. Back in 2017 John Green hadn’t published anything in over five years so perhaps in my hunger for new J.G. YA I was not as critical as I could have been and posted an effusive […]

“There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t”

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Aza Holmes doesn’t have a lot of friends, and her best friend Daisy, a gregarious and outgoing fan fiction writer, sometimes finds her a bit exhausting. This is not surprising, as Aza struggles with anxiety and OCD. When local billionaire Russell Davis Picket goes missing and there is a reward offered for news of his whereabouts, Daisy remembers that Aza knows his son. Daisy orchestrates a scenario so that Aza can reconnect with Davis, who she hasn’t seen for a few years. Aza and Davis […]

Episode 1-31: Just the Beasts Under Your Bed, In Your Closet, In Your Head

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https://killingmykindle.com/2018/08/27/episode-1-31-just-the-beasts-under-your-bed-in-your-closet-in-your-head/ Wherein I review: 119. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker 120. Serpentine (Anita Blake #26) by Laurell K. Hamilton 121. The Sellout by Paul Beatty 122. Turtles All The Way Down by John Green 123. Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet 124. Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames 125. The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp Helene Wecker gives us a historical love story between two servant myths. Laurell K. Hamilton comes back and sets Anita Blake against […]

It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.

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CBR10Bingo – So Popular! Here’s my confession: I don’t think I liked this novel very much. For starters, I am not a huge fan of YA books in general. I appreciate them in a lot of ways, and I own plenty and supply them to my teenagers readily. So mostly it’s a matter of me not choosing to read them much. And this book is perfectly good. It’s readable, it’s charming, it’s smart; but I also think it’s ham-fisted at times and manipulative throughout. Given […]

Nothing to do with turtles, really

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I don’t profess to be the picture of mental health, but overall I’d say I don’t have a lot of experience with depression, anxiety, or any other mental disorders. Maybe it’s my WASPy suppressive tendencies? In our YA book club, the woman who suggested John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down described it as “the best depiction of anxiety” she’d ever seen, so I was intrigued. Turtles tells the story of Aza, a young woman dealing (poorly, but trying) with serious anxiety and OCD. Aza’s […]



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