Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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This is the slasher send-up I wanted

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

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TW: abuse, alcoholism, self-harm, suicide BINGO: COLD [a portion of the story takes place in the frozen Idaho winter; also there are some cold-blooded murders] Jade is obsessed with horror movies. Specifically she loves slashers. She knows everything there is to know about the movies, the plots, the directors, the film-making process, everything. It is her entire life and personality, to a fault. She doesn’t have much else to do in a small town in Proofrock, Idaho. She even weaves in her slasher obsession into her […]

Worth your time, but maybe not the lingering headache

The Treatment by Mo Hayder

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Crime fiction is an odd thing. Visit your average thriller-horror-Facebook group and you’ll regularly find people looking for books that portray the extremes of human behaviour. “The sicker the better”, as they put it. Weirdly, The Treatment by Mo Hayder is not one that pops up very often – possibly because it’s about 20 years old – but in all honesty, this book is intense. We didn’t believe in Trigger Warnings in 2022 but this book could do with a couple of them.  On a […]

Where Hands Go by Krystaelynne Sanders Diggs

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Trigger Warning: Book being reviewed discusses childhood sexual abuse, hereafter called CSA, just in case you need to skip.   Where Hands Go by Krystaelynne Sanders Diggs is a really well-illustrated resource that uses an easily accessible poem (whose rhyme scheme doesn’t hit 100% of the time, but you know that I’m much more of a stickler for that than most readers, and definitely child readers), to talk to kids about bodily autonomy.  Through really great illustrations of a young, black, female-presenting child & her mom, […]

https://cannonballread.com/2021/08/where-hands-go-nte/

“There is nothing nice about Southern ladies!”

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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BINGO – LIBATIONS [TW: sexual assault/rape] It’s the early 1990s, and Patricia Campbell lives in a suburb of Charleston, South Carolina with her husband, two kids, and mother-in-law. She does what she can to be a picturesque Southern lady: exceptional manners and hospitality, exquisite outfits, pristine home, and exemplary family. She is a perfect Southern peach, and she’s bored. The only outlet she has that is solely for herself is her book club filled with other women just like her. To escape their lives, they […]

Trigger warning for rape: The Wheel of Time (Part IV)

A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan

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I’ve written 8,600 words in reviewing the first six books in this series. And they can basically be boiled down to, “the gender dynamics here suck, the characterization is pretty awful at times, and the world building is incredibly and gratuitously detailed, but this series serves as a vital bridge between the endless Tolkien rehashing and the maturation of the fantasy genre that followed in its wake. There are many things here to admire – but I kind of hate these books. Anyway, here’s the […]

In which a shocking shift in tone and genre works wonderfully

Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley

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Nathan and his family move around a lot. They have currently found themselves in a rented farmhouse in a small, rural North Carolina community in the 1950s. The family that Nathan’s parents are renting from live in the main house on property. They have a son, Roy, who is a senior at the same high school that Nathan will go to as an underclassman; Roy even drives the local school bus. Very small town. Where Nathan is school-focused and shy, Roy is outgoing and more […]



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