Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Far from the Tree by Robin Benway

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After finishing Far from the Tree, I told myself, “Well, that was a ride.” But was it a good or bad one? Yes. There were things I loved, and things I hated. Sometimes I thought the characters were amazing, sometimes horrible (really horrible, and not necessarily where you might think that yourself). They were real and they were stereotypes. They are good and they are bad. In other words, human. Robin Benway created a story of three biologically siblings (boy, girl, girl). And there are […]

Digging Deep

The Night Shift by Alex Finlay

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New Jersey, New Year’s Eve 1999. A skeleton crew – four high school girls and their only slightly older manager – work the graveyard shift at a Blockbuster’s. The girls gossip and skirt their duty. Their manager – kindly, wearily and ineffectively – tries to get them to do their jobs, but the girl’s aren’t having it. Hours later they are all found dead. Only the youngest of them, Ella Monroe, survives. A suspect is quickly found but he flees before anyone can catch him.  […]

“If You’re Not Happy, Maybe Ask Yourself If It’s Worth It”

Sacred Heart by Liz Suburbia

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Spoilers below: I’ve reread this book a few times over the seven years since it came out (I actually think I read her other work before this was published, so I was familiar with her style beforehand). It’s the kind of book where you enjoy it and it raises more questions than it answers. The ending reveals a little of what’s been going on, but way more is left up to your imagination. In the hands of another author, this might grate or feel cheap, […]

Beauty & Cruelty

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

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After the herculean doorstop that was Brandon Sanderson’s Way of Kings, I needed a fast, fun, and gripping read. So I turned to Holly Black, whose Folk of the Air trilogy I gobbled up in about 72 hours over Thanksgiving break. The Darkest Part of the Forest did not disappoint, and I blew through it in a day. Written a few years before Folk of the Air, it was fun to see how Black was playing around with the themes and premises that she later expanded […]

You know life is cruel, life is never kind

Neighborhood Watch by Joseph A. Turkot

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It’s the fall of 1995 in a small, sleepy town in suburban America. A young boy named Brandon disappears while walking home from school. The people of the town assume he’ll come back on his own account, but his classmates, Jake and Colin, become less sure. They set out to discover what has happened to Brandon, but as more and more boys vanish from the neighborhood they inadvertently end up putting their own lives at risk.  Though it has been written from the perspective of […]

A platter of insights topped with a sprinkle of advice and a drizzle of judgement

The Art of Growing Up by John Marsden

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This book starts with a powerful chapter about young children and teens who are troubled and how we treat them differently as soon as they become young adults – losing our compassion and expecting them to act like the rest of us rational beings when really it isn’t possible after the dysfunctional upbringing they’ve endured. After reading this I thought the whole book was going be similar – a real challenge to my way of thinking. The rest was…… ok. Some of the writing I […]



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