Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Public librarian reading in Western NY.

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“We are headed toward the unknown, and we have no choice but to sit quietly in our hard seats and let ourselves be taken there.”

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

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This was a book club read, and not one I probably would have picked up on my own. Told in two timelines, we have two main POV characters: Molly Ayer, a 17 year old foster kid who is months away from aging out of the system. Molly is tough, and guarded, and like many foster kids, has been bounced around from placement to placement. Caught trying to steal a library book, Molly has to complete community service hours with nonagenarian Vivian, in order to avoid […]

Unfettered Capitalism and the American Dream

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

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This is an absolutely fascinating work of family history, that just happens to also be a searing indictment of that family’s contribution to the opioid crisis. The first chunk of this book details the origins of the Sackler family. In some ways, it’s a truly American success story: the three brothers, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond, were the children of immigrants. All became doctors. The three brothers purchased a small pharmaceutical company in the early 1950’s (Purdue Pharma), which Mortimer and Raymond mostly ran while Arthur […]

Hoo boy, does this book bring the creep!

Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey

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Vera Crowder has A Past. A Past filled with things that are Very Bad. When she gets the call from her mother to come home, Vera very much does not want to…but she goes home anyway. Her mother, Daphne, is dying, and needs Vera to help clean up/sort through/clean out the house. The house, which is a living museum to Vera’s father, Francis – plexiglass screwed down over tabletops and carpets, everything perfectly preserved. Daphne also wants Vera to make nice with James Duvall, an […]

“There’s no such thing as living happily ever after — there’s only living.”

Hunted by Meagan Spooner

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Let’s retell Beauty and the Beast, but make it Russian. Yeva is Beauty. She’s the youngest of three daughters, and the favorite. She would much rather be out in the woods hunting with her father than playing lady’s maid at the palace. But alas, her father is a merchant now, not a hunter, and so everyone lives in town and Acts Civilized. Until, of course, her father loses everything on a bad investment, and the family is forced to pack up and move to their […]

An alternate history of the space program? Sign me up!

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

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It’s 1952, and a meteorite has just impacted in the Chesapeake Bay, instantly obliterating much of the east coast, including Washington, DC (and all the important stuff therein). Enter Elma York, a former WASP pilot and current computer for the space program. Elma is a math whiz, and shortly works out that the cataclysm is actually an extinction-level event. As go the dinosaurs, so are about to go the people. Humanity’s response to the impending disaster is to look towards the stars: if Earth will […]

I feel like I should have loved this book.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

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Well, this is an awkward review to write. I know that this book is widely beloved, but I just…didn’t love it. It was FINE! I wasn’t mad at it! But something about it failed to sufficiently warm the cockles of my cold, dead heart. This is my second T.J. Klune, and I didn’t love Under the Whispering Door, either. But people told me that I would like this one more. And I did, just not a lot more. I actually feel like if I had […]



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