Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Fiction Reviews Dump

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chain

Another Place You've Never Been by Rebecca Kauffman

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See by Juliann Garey

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Dietland by Sarai Walker

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

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Apologies in advance, and I hope I can be forgiven for the end-of-the-year review dump. I’ve had bits and pieces to say about the books I read but it never felt well-formed enough to tell others about them. So, here we go, a review dump of some of the fiction I read this year.  A Good Neighborhood |  Therese Anne Fowler We’ve all been reading long enough to know that a book titled A Good Neighborhood is not actually about a good neighborhood. It’s about […]

I’m not 100% sure of everything I read but I loved every second of it

On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

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On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son, named Little Dog, to his illiterate mother. The majority of the letter deals with Little Dog coming to terms with and making sense of his life and the lives of his mother and grandmother. He tells his memory of events from childhood all the way through college graduation. The letter is an attempt for him, a gay, college-educated, young man to bridge the gap between who he is and his family, specifically his mother, […]

You know when it’s not the book’s fault you didn’t like it, you just read it at the wrong time?

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

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I read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as a book club pick during the dead time between Christmas and New Year’s, and resented it the whole time for not being a lightweight romance or cozy mystery. If I had read it in deep February, I might have loved it. On Earth is a novel about inherited childhood trauma written as a letter by the narrator, Little Dog, to his mother, who will never read it. It jumps from events before his birth – the devastating […]

Big time catch up post

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell

The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

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I am WAY behind. I have a stand-alone review planned for my favorite book of the year and another group review for a series on the way but I needed to knock these out and get my count down a bit. How the gracious did I get so backlogged. Let’s take these one-by-one because they really don’t have a whole lot in common. Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert Reading Red, White & Royal Blue earlier this year turned me around a bit on […]

Simply a Beautiful Memoir

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is simply a beautiful book. It is the memoir a young man who is the son of a Vietnamese immigrant single mother. The whole book is written as a letter to his mother, although she cannot read so he knows she will never read his words. The author describes his childhood in Hartford and touches on his mother and grandmother’s lives in Vietnam during the war years before they left for America. Their lives were full of intense pain and […]

To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

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This is a novel that I will be thinking about for a very long time. It’s so far out of my sphere of relatability that it is almost impossible for me to form a coherent thought about it. Not easy to read, and equally difficult to review. Weaving back and forth through time, Vuong’s novelized autobiography is about growing up as a Vietnamese immigrant in Hartford Connecticut in the 1990’s. Written as a letter to his mother who cannot read, the young man known as […]



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