Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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meddling with merfolk

Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet

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“One thing. I’ve got experience with explosives. Another thing. I’ve got explosives.” I do not know why this book has such a low rating on GR – 2.8 as of the time of this posting – as it’s a fluffy little environmental thriller, but I suppose you can’t make everyone happy! Not that there is too much in Mermaids in Paradise to be happy with, what with the incredibly privileged narrator and her cavalcade of side characters who oscillate wildly between do-gooders and backstabbers. Mermaids in Paradise – […]

My high hopes for horror were halted

Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

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I read another one of Enriquez’s collections of short stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, earlier this year. I loved that collection so much. In my review, I called it the ‘most effective collection of short stories I [had] ever read’ and a ‘knockout’. I figured that Things We Lost in the Fire would be similar. Unfortunately that is not the case. In Things We Lost in the Fire, we have the same elements in each short story present in the collection of short stories in The Dangers […]

“The world is a dangerous place, full of people who don’t trust each other. This is why I am staying up in this tree.”

Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link

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Stranger Things Happen is Kelly Link’s first collection of short fiction, but- PLOT TWIST: it was the only book of hers that I had yet to read. Oops! I suppose….stranger things HAVE happened. Link writes like the  girl in the back of homeroom who is weird, yes, but also cool and intimidating. She’s probably wearing black and writing allover her arms with a ballpoint pen. She knows a lot and she is not afraid to drop reference after reference and allusion after allusion- she doesn’t care […]

all ABOARD!

Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi

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Mysterious and melancholy adventure awaits! Otto and Xavier, legally paired but not traditionally wed, receive a lavish not-honeymoon gift from a fabulously wealthy aunt: a trip on a strange and fabulous train. They don’t know where they are going, why they have been invited, or who is truly pulling the strings behind this event. They don’t know if the reclusive woman who lives full-time on the train (what a dream!) held up a sign that said “HELP” or “HELLO”, and they don’t know if they […]

I can’t fully get on board the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad won both the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, and part of me is sheepish that I can’t get behind that level of admiration. While the novel is powerful and at times poignant, I had a fundamental issue with its execution. The novel focuses on Cora, a young slave on a Georgia cotton plantation whose mother was infamous for having been the only slave to ever escape that estate. Cora is an outcast even […]

lovely, stinking, brutal, sunburned, magical, and filthy.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Jacob de Zoet is a young man of meager means. He has hitched his hopes to the Dust East India Company- he’ll spend several trading seasons on Dejima- about as far away from home and his fiancée as he can physically be. What is Dejima? Why, I’m glad you asked! The year is 1799, and Japan is very strict in regards to foreign interference and influence. Following disasters interactions with the Spanish and Portuguese decades earlier, Japan is a closed empire. Dejima, a man-made island […]



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