Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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This is how I get in trouble when ppl ask me what books are about

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

Wrong Alibi by Christina Dodd

Tourist Season by Brynne Weaver

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Because none of these three books was technically focused on what these reviews are focused on, but still, I promise these reviews are about these books.  Somehow. Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter – Gory & intense, but it probably should be, given the subject matter, which is kidnapping, rape, torture, missing women and children. It was a rough read, that’s for sure, but I also thought it was pretty good.  Thought the author did a great job of talking about the way tragedies impact families, how […]

Pretty fucked up

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I downloaded the novella Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes from Overdrive a few weeks ago waiting for its follow up novel Pretty Girls. At the time I found it to be a bit unnecessary; having read the novel I find it completely unnecessary. “You couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about the missing teenage girl. Sixteen years old. White. Middle class. Very pretty. No one ever seemed quite as outraged when an ugly woman went missing.” First of all, I started this as an audio-book and just could not […]

Frivolous Filler

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I enjoyed Karin Slaughter’s The Good Daughter so checked out ‘Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes’ on Overdrive as a precursor to my reading Pretty Girls (I have been hovering on the top of the library wait-list for weeks, wth PPL!) even though the reviews indicated it was a pretty unnecessary prequel. While I haven’t read Pretty Girls (yet) I can see why the general consensus was … why? Julia Carroll is a (VERY) pretty girl attending school to be a journalist in Athens, Georgia; a news story about a missing girl catches […]

Women are always the strong ones. [gratuitous David Tennant]

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“You couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about the missing teenage girl. Sixteen years old. White. Middle class. Very pretty. No one ever seemed quite as outraged when an ugly woman went missing.” I will admit I was not immediately into this book. It opens from the point of view of a father writing to his dead daughter which was a bit overly emotional to me. Then cut to one insufferable woman who hates on the other mother’s at her daughter’s basketball game all […]

It’s all fun and games until someone gets waterboarded. Or raped. Or murdered in a snuff film. You know what, fuck it.

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I had such high hopes for this one, guys. Pretty Girls had positive reviews, strong word-of-mouth, and I really pretty cover that I could Instagram the hell out of. You see?! And yay, mini cupcakes!   But by the time I was almost done with this book, trudging through the last 100 pages, all I could think was, “I’m getting real tired of this shit.” I don’t know if you’ve managed to piece this together yet, but I read a lot. Good books, bad books, […]

“Optimism is a sliver of glass in your heart”

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This is a rare book that blends both mystery and character building in equal parts. I had never read Karin Slaughter before, but I think I will be remedying that soon. The style of this book and Slaughter’s writing reminded me of the better elements of Tana French and Gillian Flynn. Start to finish, this book is fast-paced and unflinching in its portrayal of pure evil. The story revolves around the disappearance of Julia Carroll in 1994. It looks at the ways her disappearance affected her family […]



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