Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“And now it was time to get fucked by a robot to meet her unborn child.”

Margo's Got Money Trouble by Rufi Thorpe

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  A story about perseverance, forgiveness, and the answer to the question of what Pokemon is your dick  most like. Plot: Margo has been floating through life with little in the way of inter or introspection. At 20, she’s plowing her way through community college and her literature professor, though neither with any serious enthusiasm. Since her 37 year old prof was really confident about the pull out method, she winds up pregnant, and against every piece of advice, she decides to keep the baby. Why? […]

sex work can also be funny!

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

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UGH to recap my mid-book status update: what a FANTASTIC book-as-advertisement for the importance of comprehensive sex education in schools that focuses on both the benefits of long term reversible contraception as well as what healthy, mutually fulfilling sexual relationships look like! If Margo as a character wasn’t amusing and so forthright with her personal failings I’d have thrown this book at a wall. I’ll note that my review isn’t because I disliked the plot, even though I am explicitly on the record as disliking […]

“Who cared about sex, really? When what you needed was someone to talk to in the dark.” CBR BINGO – Smash (Cannonball!)

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

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“There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It’s like going to meet your new boyfriend’s family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It’s almost easier to believe I’m real than to understand what’s actually going on. […]

A Meh Take on Friendship and Growing Up

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Rufi Thorpe’s debut novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar, focuses on the friendship of two girls as it stretches from childhood to adulthood. Lorrie Ann is the golden girl with a perfect family and a perfect home. Mia has an alcoholic mother, two young brothers she both loves and hates and, as the book opens, is 15 and figuring out how to get out of a soccer game so she can get an abortion. As they grow older, one becomes a teacher and researcher, the other […]



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