Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Always this empty heart, always

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

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Dave Win is a thirteen year old school boy at the start of this novel. It’s 1960s England, and Dave – the bastard son of an Englishwoman and a Burmese man, long lost to the turmoils of his home country – grows up as the perpetual outsider. Dave is clever; he has won a scholarship to an elite boarding school, handed out by Mark and Cara Hadlow. The Hadlows are noblesse oblige: patrons of the arts, champions of the disadvantaged. When we first meet Dave […]

(Es)sex and Pirates

Glitterland by Alexis Hall

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Ash Winters is one of those characters you find in a lot of books: the Failed Male Writer. Once a darling of England’s literary scene, Ash now writes pulpy yet wildly successful thrillers as he battles with crippling depression. Then he meets Darian, frequently described by Ash as a glitter pirate: a male model from Essex. There’s spray tan, nylon and the kind of clothing that pairs glitter with artfully crafted holes. Ash is a snob, so he looks down on Darian, but Darian is […]

“An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched”

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012) by emily m. danforth

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CBR Bingo square “Queer Lives”: The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a queer YA novel, and was banned in a middle school in 2015 in Delaware for “inappropriate language.” I mean, fuck that. The novel was also criticised by the School Library Journal for its length and pacing, and my inclination is also to say fuck that, but I do understand that this is the kind of thing where YMMV. It did take a while to get into, but I was fully immersed when I did. […]

My Kind of Western

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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This novella has been sitting on my kindle forever and I don’t know why it took me this long to read it but I’m so glad I finally did! I think I’ve talked before about my struggles with short fiction, I always want more. This one wasn’t any different. I don’t know if reading any of Gailey’s other novellas would help clear up some of the background on this story. It’s set in a dystopian America torn apart by war with most people reduced to […]

Grief As A Creative Force

Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

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I honestly don’t remember where I first heard about this book – Instagram? One of the dozens of bookish emails I seem to get every single day? Maybe just scrolling through the Libby app? However it came into my life, I am really glad it did. This one is about Magos and Joseph and their son, Santiago, who has just died when the book opens. He was born with only one lung, and after his body finally gives out, Magos, in her grief, removes a […]

Last of the Lumberjanes

Lumberjanes: End of Summer Adventure by Shannon Watters, Kat Leygh

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So it turns out the Lumberjanes series has reached its conclusion with volume 20: “End of Summer Adventure”. This series has had ups and downs and I think the conclusion is a little mixed. On the one hand, the questions that really need answering are resolved. For example, what’s up with Rosie, what’s really going on in the forest around the camp, and what’s the spooky bad thing that got released a volume or two ago. But then again, the actual reveals are kind of […]



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