Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Finding Hope in Confronting the Past and the Present

The Secret of You and Me by Melissa Lenhardt

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A lot of the queer fiction I have been recently has featured characters living in either New York or the Pacific North West, or both. Places with widespread acceptance of queerness, or at least enough that the characters are rarely under threat for it within the text, regardless of the real world. The Secret of You and Me on the other hand, draws much of it’s power from the inverse, from a lack of acceptance in community, of what it feels like when you are […]

Deaf Utopia by Nyle DiMarco

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I’ll admit it. I watched almost every single season of America’s Next Top Model. Mostly I loved seeing how the photos turned out in the end, tuning out the manipulated drama that took up half of each episode until the photo shoots began. Nyle DiMarco, the show’s first Deaf contestant, won season 22 (yeah, there were that many seasons and more). Much has been written about the problematic aspects of the show, and one chapter of his does touch on an episode where the producers […]

https://cannonballread.com/2022/08/deaf-utopia-sofi-keren/

Different Scandals in Different Places

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

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Bingo 11: Scandal A Strange and Stubborn Endurance opens with a scandal of sorts (or at least the inciting incident that gets the plot going does), and there’s a fear and use of gossip that gets brought up and/or used off and on throughout the story. There is a content warning at the beginning about the scandal which involves on-page sexual violence as well as self-harm and suicidal ideation; side note, I’m a little surprised that the one murder that does succeed before the final […]

Transition Can Save Your Life, But It Won’t Fix It By Itself

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

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Nevada found me at an interesting point in my life. I find myself at a midpoint between the two protagonists, Maria and James, looking forwards and back at them and wondering how I relate to them and how they would relate to me. Maria is a trans woman, living in New York and finding herself without direction. Transition has made her the woman she is today, but on the heels of a breakup with her longterm girlfriend, she’s not really sure who that is anymore. […]

“He startled when a tear slipped down his cheek. “Do I have a choice?” “In life? Always.” “And in death?” She shrugged. “It’s a little more … regimented.”

Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune

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In one word: lovely I first read T.J. Klune last year when I came across the heartwarming, lovely, funny, romantic queer fantasy “House in the Cerulean Sea.” It was one of my top 3 best books of last year, so my expectations for this book were high: astronomical even. I am delighted to report that I equally loved the heartwarming, lovely, funny, romantic, queer fantasy “Under the Whispering Door.” If that pile of adjectives gets you jazzed, run, don’t walk to your nearest library or […]

The cowboys are Librarians who work with more than books

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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Upright Women Wanted has a really interesting set-up: take your standard Western setting, and instead of cowboys, substitute a group of women called Librarians, whose supposed job is to delivery Approved Materials for reading and pick up the old or worn out materials for fixing up. Esther wants to join the Librarians to get away from her past and she stows away in a Librarian wagon. Obviously she gets caught and reaches a tentative agreement with the Head Librarian Bet about apprenticing. The novella follows […]



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