Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“When things get tough, you find out who’s in your corner. That’s all you need to claw your way back from rock bottom.”

I Wanna Be Your Girl (Volume 2) by Umi Takase

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Spoilers follow throughout this review! This second volume of I Wanna Be Your Girl continues to follow the journey of Akira and Hime. Akira is a trans girl who has been allowed to wear the girls’ uniform to school, but the mockery and backlash was strong enough that her best friend Hime decides to wear the boys’ uniform in solidarity. Hime and Akira have always been very close and they now are starting to make their first faltering steps towards other friends while learning how to […]

“The economy’s in ruins, no one’s got a job, and we just don’t care, it’s bliss.”

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

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It’s 1983. Thatcher is at No. 10 and Nick Guest, age 21, has just graduated from Oxford University. He finds himself as a lodger at the house of a college friend, Toby, whose father Gerald Fedden has been elected as a promising new conservative MP. Nick, who comes from a solidly middle class background, finds himself a loose thread intricately woven into the upper class social fabric of the Freddens. Nick has the wrong background and the wrong predilections, and he knows it doesn’t take […]

A banned novel about WWI, conscientious objectors and gays

Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini

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Despised and Rejected is a 1918 novel by Rose Allatini (using the pen name AT Fitzroy) that was banned and pulled off the market for being ‘morally unhealthy’ following a trial of its publisher CW Daniel. The Gay Men’s Press republished the novel in 1988 and the Persephone Press edition that I read came out in 2018. Set during WWI, the novel’s main characters are a bisexual woman named Antoinette and a gay man named Dennis who is also a conscientious objector. The novel begins […]

Weddings: a Bit of a Faff

Husband Material (London Calling #2) by Alexis Hall

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In Husband Material (predictably the sequel to Boyfriend Material; number three in the series, Father Material, is still pending), Luc and Oliver are still a happy couple. They are thirty-ish, and anyone who is thirty-ish will remember that that is the age at which one seems to have a matrimonial or matrimonially-adjacent activity seemingly every week. There are four in this book. There is also a funeral. The sequence of events naturally leads Luc to the question whether or not he should propose to Oliver. […]

“Like eating very expensive chocolate, savouring every moment because you don’t know when you’ll have it again.”

Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall

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Luc O’Donnell is the son of two rockstar parents: his mother is a French-Irish (but mostly French) folk singer, his father a legendary rock star who has been absent from Luc’s life since he was a toddler. Luc is, to put it mildly, a mess: when we meet him, he is trying and failing to make out with a guy who turns out to be a Buzzfeed reporter. After the terse encounter ends, Luc flees the club, faceplants outside on the kerb and is promptly […]

Welcome to the Land of Missed Opportunity

Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake

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Make the Season Bright – Because one of the main characters is called Brighton, get it?  Charlotte Donovan is a successful musician, living the dream in New York. She is a violinist in a string quartet, about to set off on a huge European tour. First, though, Charlotte must survive December, the month when her life usually comes off the rails. December is when Charlotte becomes extra accident-prone. Worse, it’s the month in which her fiancée Brighon left her at the altar. To help her […]



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