Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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When You’re Too Hard Core for Raymond Chandler

Fast One by Paul Cain

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Bingo square – People This noir classic was created when Paul Cain patched together five stories that he had written for the detective magazine Black Mask.  Published in 1933, it soon became famous as the book that was just too hardboiled to be fashioned into a movie.  And seriously, it is, even by today’s standards.  Daaaaamn son. Paul Cain was by then a slippery character in Hollywood.  That was not his real name, nobody was quite sure where he was from (spoiler, Iowa, actually), and […]

This has got to be the most misleading title ever

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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Today is June 30th and the end of Pride month. How very fitting that I finished The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo today. This book is queer as hell, and I had no idea going in. I just knew that I loved Daisy Jones and the Six by Reid, and this book came highly praised by friends and Cannonballers alike. I loved nearly every moment of it. This book is told through two main points of view, that of Evelyn Hugo and that of her biographer Monique Grant. […]

Ol’ Hollywood

Windhall by Ava Barry

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Sigh. Why can’t books like this be easier to review? There’s so much to like about Ava Barry’s debut novel Windhall…and so much that grated on my nerves. I really wanted to push this to a charity first-book-4-star review and I just couldn’t. The book kind of feels like the version of the decaying mansion at the center of the story: beautiful and glamorous but uninhabitable and far past its prime. Probably easier with this one to pull out the old good/bad formula: Good: -The book […]

“Everyone loves a beautiful dead girl.”

Windhall by Ava Barry

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Windhall is a novel about Hollywood, the way men treat women, fame, obsession, and Los Angeles. Hailey is an antisocial journalist at a counterculture zine turned blog (I think) in LA. He is obsessed with the decades old murder of a Hollywood star at the home of an infamous director. His obsession weaves in with his own family’s story, as well as the DNA of modern day Los Angeles. It’s hard for him to separate the glamour and allure of the city with the facts, […]

“…reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.”

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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Next up on my “Pajiba recommendations for sure shot books until I pay my library fines” list – in case anyone is wondering, my fines are paid and I’m now a fully operational library patron again and forevermore – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Basic premise – Evelyn is an aging, reclusive old Hollywood star giving the scoop of a lifetime to a reporter for a Vogue-surrogate magazine. Evelyn is brash, confident, and chilly. Monique, the reporter, is floating along letting her life happen […]



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