Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The rope you climb becomes the rope that binds you

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag

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Maybe I’m just a little bit biased because my name shows up in this book! I’ll give it a 3.5 star, but rounded up although at the end of the day it is a pretty standard story. This is a quirky little gothic-y book by way of Bangalore. It’s a very condensed version of the White Tiger story of what it takes to rise in Indian society, and the people you crush along the way like so many small ants. I enjoyed not feeling “too dumb” for […]

“What say you, Dandelion? Is there still good sense in the world? Or do only contemptibility and contempt remain?”

The Time of Contempt (The Witcher, #2) by Andrzej Sapkowski

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I had a bit of a tough time with this one, after pretty much devouring the last two. It may have just been my mood at the time, or it may not have been. Shrug. Stylistically, this is pretty similar to Blood of Elves. Sapkowski continues to have a really episodic writing style. Each chapter features a new location with new POV characters, and each chapter features the characters engaged in one or more long conversations as a way to bring across plot. These books […]

I laughed, I cried, I will re-read.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.” This is my favorite of Backman’s books (that I’ve read) by quite a large margin. I would […]

The ones that I couldn’t finish (NOT my double Cannonball!)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Trelegemeproblemet (The Three-Body Problem) by Liu Cixin

Of Curses and Kisses by Sandhya Menon

American Demon by Kim Harrison

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Dear readers, I’m not going to lie, I’m racing against the clock to get all of my reviews finished in time for the CBR12 deadline (12 noon EST – or 6 pm Oslo time). I also need to finish 25% of the final novel I’m reviewing, co-parent my autocratic, demanding, and rather clingy almost-three-year-old, plan and prep a three-course New Year’s meal, and possibly do some last-minute shopping. No pressure, right? So when fellow Cannonballer Pixifer posted a review with all of her DNF’s for the year, […]

cbr12bingo – Fresh Start

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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I have a confession to make: I judged this book by its cover. I remember the frenzy of press around this book, the series, and the *mysterious* author. I also remember seeing the cover and being completely uninterested. It is, in my opinion, a dreadful cover. It looks like it was cobbled together to act as a prop. It looks like a poorly thought out passion project. I still think the cover is awful, but I am glad that I changed my mind around shunning […]

“He breathed in my face the coffee he’d just drunk, mingled with the odor of his gums.”

A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

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1970s Naples: a thirteen year old girl of privilege is suddenly removed from her seaside home and returned to a cramped and dirty apartment outside the city.  The key word here is “returned”; our heroine has been sent “home” to a place that she never knew. She spent her entire life living with her glamorous mother and policeman father, only to have that reality shattered in one afternoon when the man she knew as her father bundles her and all of her belongings into the […]



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