Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I have everything I ever wanted–and it tastes just as delicious as I always imagined.”

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

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I love an unreliable narrator. Whether they are divorced from reality à la Montresor of “The Cask of Amontillado,” deceiving themselves as a defense against trauma, like Pi in Life of Pi, or intentionally deceiving the reader, as in many mysteries I won’t name to avoid spoilers. . .I just can’t get enough of them. What intrigues me about June Hayward (aka Juniper Song) in Yellowface is I’m never certain how much of her own press she buys into. She definitely believes she’s been screwed […]

Few things as fun as a good book or two

O.K. Is Gay: A Picture Book by Vincent X. Kirsch

Here Is a Book:  A Picture Book by Elisha Cooper

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There are few things as fun as a good book. Two of those books were found recently by me via online reader copies. The first by Vincent X. Kirsch is a contemporary story on how it is okay to be gay. And the other is a book about books. Or more accurately how a book goes from idea to your hands. I was a little skeptical about O.K. Is Gay: A Picture Book  as it was mostly starting out as “just another it’s okay to […]

I’m living Athena’s life. I’m experiencing publishing the way it’s supposed to work.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

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I know what you’re thinking. Thief. Plagiarizer. And perhaps, because all bad things must be racially motivated, Racist. Hear me out. It’s not so awful as it sounds. Readers, it is exactly as bad as it sounds. Juniper Song Hayward is bad person, but don’t worry, she has forgiven herself. Yellowface is told to the reader by June. We are her confessor. She tells us all of her resentments, fears, manipulations, and triumphs. Most of all, she tells us her rationalizations. Athena Liu and June […]

Go Ask Alice… If You Can Find Her!

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson

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One of the breakout books of the YA genre was Go Ask Alice, the purported diary of a nameless teenage drug addict and runaway. However, the story behind that book and its follow-up, Jay’s Journal, is far more convoluted and amorally exploitative than anyone would expect. I have actually read Go Ask Alice. I was interested in it because of the controversy surrounding its reality, and reading the protagonist’s wild dash through various illicit drugs made it pretty clear that it was indeed not real. The overblown writing […]

Hooray for the Book Exchange, and hooray for narfna!

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

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This was a lovely treat from narfna, courtesy of the 2020 Book Exchange. I loved the clever telling of the story-within-a-story, and I almost wanted to know the end of the ‘fictional’ story more than I did the ‘real’ one. Susan Ryeland is an editor. Her company publishes the Atticus Pund series, wildly successful detective books with a Poirot/Gamache-style main character. She introduces herself at the beginning, saying the ninth book in the series would change her life. Then you get to read the manuscript […]

As close as I get to DNF and maybe first 1 star review

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There’s a few lines on the back cover blurbs that say, “FSG is no ivory tower- the owner’s wife called the office a ‘sexual sewer’- and its untold story is as tumultuous and engrossing as many of the great novels it has published.” This is talking about the American publisher of T.S. Eliot, and other literary greats including Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, Philip Wroth, and Jonathan Franzen. I like books, I like literary history, and I like bibliography, therefore I should have liked this. And […]



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