Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Sweet, Ghibli-esque cottage core fantasy

Flowerheart by Catherine Bakewell

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What: Catherine Bakewell’s Flowerheart is a lovely coming into one’s power tale with Studio Ghibli vibes and a charmingly rustic setting,  It’s also a fairytale with wild magic, curses, witches and wizards.  Running through is the rebuilding of a childhood friendship that turns to romance. Who: Clara Lucas is a witch in training, about to turn sixteen, and afraid of her power.  Her magic surges in wild, and sometimes destructive, ways and is affected by her mood.  On the benign side flowers will spontaneously bloom in her […]

“It’s good being the horror chick, sure, always standing away from the rest of the crowd, smoking bitter cigarette after better cigarette, she’d have it no other way, but it’s nice to make eye contact with someone else with a black heart, too, and then breath smoke out slow, like judgment.”

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

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In one word: Frenetic Cannonball Read Bingo: Machines (I mean…it’s in the title!) All right, peeps. I’m here to tell you unequivocally that you need some Stephen Graham Jones in your life. Full stop. I am a casual horror fan. I cannot and do not watch horror TV or movies (nope nope nooooope) but do like reading horror. I’ve read a lot of the classics, but it’s been a hot minute since I took in something in from the genre. My first horror in a […]

Magical Teenager – just a bit more contemporary than Harry

What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

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This new novella in the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch covers events that happened in summer 2013 when his primary protagonist Peter Grant was off solving the case of a missing child in Herefordshire (The Hanging Tree). During that summer we follow Peter’s cousin Abigail Kamara in London as teenagers go missing around Hampstead Heath and then turn up later missing their memories. At this point Abigail is still not formally attached to “The Folly”, but she has already been exposed to the […]

Fun, if insubstantial

It's all your fault by Paul Rudnick

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This is a book that was clearly written to be a movie, or at the very least conceptualized as one. So I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the reason I recognized Rudnick’s name on the cover  (prompting my “I’ll read this at the library while watching my toddler” easy read choice) was from his work as a screenwriter. This young adult novel follows the goody-two-shoes Caitlyn, hired to keep her famous wild-child actress cousin (who is legally distinct from but awfully similar […]

A Girl Named Mister

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Nikki Grimes is a great prose-poet for young adults. Unfortunately, A Girl named Mister, did not make me think “This is my favorite book!” Had I read it when it first came out, maybe I would have enjoyed it more. I feel others have done the theme better (fourteen-year-old girl falls in love, has sex, gets pregnant). The ending is slightly unique with the reader thinking Mister will give her baby up, yet, due to conflicting emotions, will she? The fact (spoiler) the mother of […]

A long time ago, being crazy meant something. Now everybody is crazy.

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Okay—here’s the thing: This book won all sorts of awards and I think I put it on my audiobook list because I saw it recommended everywhere. But here’s what bothers me: It’s a fictional portrayal of a fictional girl who was a satellite member of a fictional Manson family, but it borrows almost every detail from the real Manson family so…why bother with the fictional names for everyone and everything? Just make it straight up historical fiction at that point. I don’t know, maybe this […]



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