Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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a very special episode in a very farcical town

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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*”Yakkety Sax” blares through your speakers* A robbery- wait, but not quite. A bank robber, but not who you expect. An accidental hostage situation. Aggressively unhelpful witnesses. A nervous eater who devours a whole lime, pith and all. Bumbling cops. Feisty old ladies. Sounds fun, yes? It is fun! There is a solid farce at the core of this story. Misunderstandings, misdirection, and missed connections fly in and out of quickly slamming doors. A manically wound player piano would not be out of place in […]

It’s a Wonderful Life (Now With Books!)

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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CW: suicide, suicidal ideation This was an interesting premise but has some deep (spoiler-y) flaws in the magical element that make it hard to get behind it from an entirely logical perspective. The not-spoiler part (available as part of book’s blurb): sometimes, instead of dying, you end up in a midway point which, for our protagonist, takes the form of an endless library in which it is always midnight and which is librarian’d by her old middle school librarian. You can read any of the […]

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad…House

It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

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A knock at the door. A series of frantic knocks at the door. Yes, It Will Just Be Us  nearly starts with “it was a dark and stormy night”. Our narrator, Sam, is a down-and-out adjunct professor of archeology barely hanging onto her sanity. After a series of upsetting events, we find her moving back to her crumbling, ancestral mansion in on the edge of a foreboding Virginia swamp. The mansion is, for all intents and purposes, haunted. It’s haunted by the living specter of her […]

Bodies Hit The Floor

Killing Williamsburg by Bradley Spinelli

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A big ol’ content warning: this book is about suicide. Suicide is on almost every page. The book itself includes graphic depictions of suicide and bodies in a post-mortem state as a result of suicide. Though I won’t go into detail myself, there’s no way to avoid talking about suicide in this review. If you are triggered by suicide or have a history with suicidal ideation, please skip both this book and this review. … Along with Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, this is another New York […]

What is happening?

The House We Grew Up In by Lisa Jewell

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I’m not even sure where to start with this one. Typically, I would summarize the plot, but I’m not sure I know what happened. I may have fallen asleep and missed something, but I’ll give it a whirl – A quirky family of six live in a house. Their family seems to revolve around their Easter celebration, until one year, tragedy strikes. Mother and Father divorce. They split the house in two and Father moves next door. Mother invites her girlfriend and her child to […]

I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me.

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CBR10Bingo: Dream Vacation (BINGO!) Emily X.R. Pan’s The Astonishing Colour of After begins with teenager Leigh recounting the day her mother died from suicide, leaving a crumpled note in the trash with a crossed out message: “I want you to remember.” Soon after, a mysterious red bird leaves a gift for Leigh: a package filled with mementos of her mother. Leigh convinces her father to take her to Taiwan for the first time to meet her mother’s estranged family, secretly hoping she’ll also be able […]



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