Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Good evening, everyone. I'm Leslie Monster, and this is Nightline. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: narfna's Quick Questions interview.)

narfna's Reviews:

Seven people go for a tour in a mysterious library housing a very rare book, and you can probably guess the rest.

The Library After Dark by Ande Pliego

by 4 Comments

Hooo, this was a hot mess. The idea of the library was great, but the execution failed. I feel this book’s existence is a symptom of the pressure on genre authors to publish a book a year. It might have been good if given more time to cook. She had a good story in her first book, and now this one is entirely made up of thriller and mystery cliches, all to the tune of overblown figurative language that makes no sense and does not […]

Her name! Was Victoria!! Sandwich!!!

The Jam Sandwich Detectives by Clare Thompson

by Leave a Comment

Thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Okay, picture Big Little Lies, but less literary and more cozy mystery-esque. A group of moms attend a cake bake-off where everyone has baked a Victoria Sponge, but before many cakes can be tasted and judged, the host (whose name is also Victoria Sandwich!) drops dead. One of our main characters, Rachel, has the blame pinned on her by the other mothers because of some offhand comments she’d […]

This book also has a character called “the cutie bandit,” which is amazing.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

by 3 Comments

When I tell you I was not interested in this book at all and then I zoomed through it in a day and a half. It was a book club pick, and I’d read and liked/loved I think three of her books before this one, but the synopsis just didn’t call to me. But, book club pick, so I reserved it from the library. This book is the epitome of what I mean when I say that writing style is the most important thing in […]

I can’t stop thinking about my lost pizza.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives (The Kamogawa Food Detectives, #1) by Hisashi Kashiwai

by 2 Comments

I maintain that this premise is amazing, and it needs to exist in real life. The idea of food I will never taste again HAUNTS ME. I am not even being dramatic, I am being so real with you right now. (My #1 pick for this would be Pizza D’Amore’s piping hot square pizza slices, in the Paradise Valley Mall. AND I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE.) I will also admit that the premise hit me so strongly that I gave this book more stars than […]

This standalone fantasy goes incredibly hard.

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao

by 17 Comments

Sending up the Bat Signal on this book, my first use of it this year. (FYI the last time I used it was with The Raven Scholar, my best book of 2025, so you know it’s serious.) I wouldn’t recommend this book as widely or as often as I have The Raven Scholar, but for a certain type of reader, this thing will hit hard. (As it hit me. Last night, crying softly on my couch as I opined to myself, IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL.) First […]

The first T. Kingfisher book is one of my new faves!

Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher

by 4 Comments

“All you had were pigs and enthusiasm. It’s not your fault.” The first book Ursula Vernon wrote under the penname T. Kingfisher; she self-published it because trad publishing did not want to subject children to things they felt were “inappropriate.” Meanwhile, she’s over here in her introduction to the new, adorable trad-published version of this book, saying things like, kids would appreciate a dead body or two. And I agree with her! Anyway, this book is in the tradition of Pratchett, with T. Kingfisher proclivities […]



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