Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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There is beauty to be found in the melting snow and McDonalds wrappers

Little Foxes Took Up Matches by Katya Kazbek

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Mitya is not good at math, as you can see. But he’s good at imagination. Mitya is utterly convinced that no one has ever looked at two halves long enough, or attentively enough. Mitya has some stories for you. Much like Mitya himself, this novel contains multitudes. Katya Kazbek, who often works as a translator, holds the door open for the curious reader with snippets of fairy tales. Sometimes these tales are her takes on mythology, and sometimes they are the mythology of being a […]

The way these characters can understand what isn’t being said, while being delightfully snarky is just the best.

And They Lived Happily Ever After by Therese Beharrie

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Representation on the page matters, and while finding representation that feels exactly like you can be some of the most affirming experiences out there, finding representation that speaks to a component of your life that isn’t exactly how you experience it is also incredibly important. Beharrie includes in her acknowledgements that a lot of what we see on the page in And They Lived Happily Ever After draws from her own experiences with Anxiety, and as usual, when an author so very obviously writes from […]

“If You’re Not Happy, Maybe Ask Yourself If It’s Worth It”

Sacred Heart by Liz Suburbia

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Spoilers below: I’ve reread this book a few times over the seven years since it came out (I actually think I read her other work before this was published, so I was familiar with her style beforehand). It’s the kind of book where you enjoy it and it raises more questions than it answers. The ending reveals a little of what’s been going on, but way more is left up to your imagination. In the hands of another author, this might grate or feel cheap, […]

“But it’s too late:” YA Nihilism and Queer Tragedy

As You Wish by Chelsea Sedoti

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This book was surface level readable, but morally it’s made me more and more mad the longer I think about it. It’s the kind of YA book where you read it in an intense sitting but are also irritated that the author isn’t trying to do more with the material. There is a lot jammed in here — a town where everyone gets a wish on their eighteenth birthday, football angst, romantic angst, dealing with your little sister being hit by a car and blaming […]

Toxic Air

the_atmospherians by Isle McElroy

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 At times, this seems like a somewhat simple book about a disgraced influencer who starts a cult with her childhood best friend. When you step away from it and look at the balancing act McElroy pulled off though, you realize they pulled off the ultimate achievement of making something difficult look easy. McElroy throws so many balls in the air and keeps juggling, successfully introducing challenging and difficult elements to make this tight-rope walk of a book work. The book begins with Sasha, a disgraced […]

“On that long journey she wept all the tears stored in her soul, leaving none in reserve for later sorrows.”

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, Margaret Sayers Peden (translator)

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It has been a few years since I last tackled an Allende work, but with tasks in both the Read Harder and Reading Women challenges about translated works (the former asking for non-European novel in translation, the latter asking specifically for a book by a South American author in translation) I had the perfect excuse to move Eva Luna up my to read list. The amount of emotion, detail, and characterization that Allende weaves into her writing is simply astounding. It always takes me a […]



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