Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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dreams fill in where memories fail

Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, Natasha Wimmer

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If you too are seeking respite from this surprisingly hot Saturday, I whole-heartedly recommend spending an hour curled up in front of a fan while reading Space Invaders from cover to cover. This is the second fictional account of being a child in Pinochet’s Chile to rise through my TBR pile this year; How to Order the Universe offered one girl’s story, while Space Invaders  trades dreams and memories from a chorus of children who grew up too soon against the terror of the 1980s. Unlike the precocious […]

“Everything that happened next was only possible because my mother was absent. It wasn’t that she left the house much, it was that a part of her had abandoned her body and now resisted coming back.”

How to Order the Universe by María José Ferrada

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A precocious child, a beat-up Renault, traveling salesmen and the uneasy promise of ghosts populate this tiny but mighty book. M, our narrator, has struck a deal with her father. They haunt the dusty roads of Pinochet’s Chile as a sales-duo, using M’s charms to sway shop owners towards buy more nails, hammers, and other hardware than her father could sell on his own. If the person in charge focused on my pupils, instead of encountering me, he or she encountered every possible form of […]

Bunnatine, Immy, Demon Lover, and Ghost Boyfriend walk into a bar…

Get In Trouble by Kelly Link

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Well, sometimes it’s a bar filled with men raised by wolves. Sometimes it’s a space ship. A warehouse full of mysterious sleeping people. A magical house full of “summer people”. A haunted house on a space ship. A lake where a few dozen nudists disappeared in the seventies. The penthouse party at a hotel full of dentists and super heroes. The crumbling remains of a Wizard of Oz theme park. A pocket universe that opened above Florida. Kelly Link writes things that are fantastic and […]

“When you’re a kid, it’s hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.”

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

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Karen Russell was just 25 when this collection came out; a fact that is plastered all over the cover, festooned in blurbs throughout the opening pages, and the header on almost every piece of criticism that was launched at the same time as this collection. Her youth is/was impressive, and most certainly made me look back at my 25-year-old self with pity, but her youth is not the spark that sets this fire. She may have been young, but her ability to give voice to […]

More like museum of obsession and drudgery

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Thirty-sixth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. It’s really difficult to capture the uneasy feeling of longing and desire that one gets when one can’t have their way. Some of us succumb to it and fall prey to obsession, going to great (and sometimes ugly) lengths to get what we want; almost always failing to get it. We all deal with such a heartbreak at least once in a lifetime and it is rare that someone comes out of it unscathed. So why would […]



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