Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Manipulated Into Caring

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

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For a tale of four siblings bound together by a traumatic experience with a fortune teller when they were young, The Immortalists is not terribly enthralling. Varya, Simon, Klara, and Daniel, the siblings, meet an old woman in a cramped and hot apartment. They have saved up and pooled their allowance; they overheard other kids in the neighborhood saying that “the woman on Hester Street” could tell you the date of your death. She gives gives our fearless foursome their dates; they do not share them with […]

“When you’re a kid, it’s hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.”

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

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Karen Russell was just 25 when this collection came out; a fact that is plastered all over the cover, festooned in blurbs throughout the opening pages, and the header on almost every piece of criticism that was launched at the same time as this collection. Her youth is/was impressive, and most certainly made me look back at my 25-year-old self with pity, but her youth is not the spark that sets this fire. She may have been young, but her ability to give voice to […]

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 […]

This fire left me feeling tepid

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I don’t normally take advice from the interwebs, but when I took a short “what should you read next quiz” that was posted to the CBR book chat page, the resulting recommendation intrigued me. Home Fire was described as a retelling of Antigone set in modern-day London. I haven’t read any Greek tragedy since high school, so I thought this could make an interesting study, to compare the classic with the modern. I have to confess, Greek tragedies were never my thing. I ate up all manner […]

A 5 star book with a major caveat.

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Every Last One is about a mother with three teenage children. They all have very realistic teenage concerns and dramas. There’s depression in the mix, an eating disorder, relationship problems, very well-written dynamics between the kids and their friends and significant others and how they all interplay. Mary Beth’s marriage isn’t really the point but there’s also some very subtle but very real commentary on being married for a long time. The parents are each doing their best to figure out how to effectively parent […]

Lady, what are you hollering?

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Well, I started the year off with a whimper. This book was glowingly recommended to me by a good friend who has led me in the past to some good stuff, so I jumped on it. I was disappointed, but the let-down was actually a little freeing, because I had just started another book she recommended, and my disappointment in Taking What I Like allowed me to give myself permission to put the other one down.* This is a book of short stories tied together […]



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