Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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That is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.

Foster by Claire Keegan

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My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me. ― Claire Keegan, Foster And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end, but each day follows on much like the one before. ― Claire Keegan, Foster In Foster, a young girl is sent to […]

It’s a twisted poor world we were both born into, that rejects us without mercy and ejects us without consultation.

The Mountains of Mourning by Lois McMaster Bujold

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“These hill-folk are ignorant, lord.” “These hill-folk are mine, Pym. Their ignorance is…a shame upon my house. Their continued ignorance anyway,” he amended in fairness. It still made a burden like a mountain. “Is this message so complex? So difficult? ‘You don’t have to kill your children anymore.’ It’s not like we’re asking them all to learn–5-space navigational math.” That had been the plague of Miles’s last Academy semester. “It’s not easy for them,” shrugged Dea. “It’s easy for the central authorities to make the […]

Handing trauma down the line

Denizen by James Mackenzie Watson

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Bingo: Violence; Passport: Bush noir Denizen is one of the most disturbing books I have ever read.  I bought it thinking I was getting another “bush noir” – an Australian crime subgenre focussed on rural murders. What I actually got was a lot more interesting, but also much more confronting.  I think my Kindle skipped over the warning at the front that “this book depicts mental ill health and self harm” as its dark turn took me by surprise.  The narrative has a familiar crime […]

hide all you want, but nothing stays buried

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

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Jeanie and Julius have spent their entire lives together. Over half a century of life together has passed, and they have never spent an entire night separate from each other. Jeanie tends the garden with their mother, Dot, and Julius works odd jobs in the village. Jeanie, Julius, and Dot depend fiercely on one another. They accept nothing from the outside world- at least, Jeanie and Julius spent the last 51 years believing that they were accepting nothing and indebted to no one but each […]

“It is very important to approach all unpleasant tasks in life as a performance art piece, especially if you are a teenager.”

Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country & Other Stories by Chavisa Woods

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Goth or not, country or not, if you have ever been a teenager then SOMETHING in this collection of stories will speak to you. Maybe you’ve never befriended a drug addict squatting in a mausoleum, and maybe you’ve never had a bad trip at a MENSA party hosted by your girlfriend’s parents, but there are definitely some teenage feelings rolling dark and deep in all of us! Chavis Woods has labeled and celebrated that feeling of “something more”; most notably in the titular story, “Things […]

Tana French is back with a vengeance and a penchant for Wild West-isms, and I am HERE. FOR. IT. 

The Searcher by Tana French

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This is a safe review; I’ll give you no spoilers and I’ll give you no major plot points- but I will let you know that no, we have not returned to the Dublin Murder Squad. While I found the departure disappointing in The Witch Elm, I found it thrilling here; the idyllic landscape filled with the insidious creep of small town communities. While we have not returned to the Murder Squad, we have returned to having a protagonist on the searching side of the law- and […]



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