Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

the many forms of love that shape life and fate

The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh

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Alright, so Iron Widow was not my jam (to my disappointment). I was really hoping that the next of my library audiobook holds would turn things around, and Axie Oh’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea came to me next. And oh, this one is my jam. Or at any rate, it hits a lot of sweet spots for me and I enjoyed it tremendously. (Not burying the lede this time, either, obviously.) The novel is not exactly a retelling of the Korean folktale “Shim Cheong” (apparently […]

full of sound and fury, signifying not quite as much as it could

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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I’m not going to bury the lede on this one: I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. The nutshell premise is undeniably cool: space fantasy with strong Pacific Rim vibes, in that you have these mecha-type constructs piloted by psychically-linked soldiers who are fighting terrible alien monsters, powering their robots through the power of their chi, but everything inflected strongly through Chinese history and mythology. Except the system is horribly corrupt: girl pilots (we’ll say girls because the protagonist always does, and […]

so long, and thanks for all the spies

Silverview by John le Carré

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I got hooked on John le Carré sometime after I finished undergrad. I’m not quite sure what started it (I think watching the Alec Guinness miniseries adaptation of Tinker Tailor with my parents, or maybe it was watching and then reading The Constant Gardener after its award season run), but I got deeply into classic spy fiction for a hot minute (and have stayed kind of into it): I started with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, moved on to classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and also […]

too light, too predictable, and also kind of too straight

Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

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I’d been reading a lot of heavy stuff lately, so I decided to break up that rhythm with something a little on the lighter side. Cue the audiobook of the first installment of Elle Cosimano’s new series, Finlay Donovan Is Killing It. It’s a pretty straightforward mistaken identity comedic romantic suspense novel, in which a single mom writer of, yes, romantic suspense novels gets mistaken for a contract killer and gets hired to bump off a woman’s husband who, as it turns out, is a […]

secrets, lies, and lockdown

56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

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“Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.” It’s already apparent we’ve got a lot of pandemic media headed our way. All the long-running TV series, of course, tried to grapple with it immediately, mostly poorly, and we’ve had a few films jump at the chance as well. Emma Donoghue’s Pull of the Stars, despite being about the 1918 flu and being released in summer 2020, was not a pandemic […]

“we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something”

Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney

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I still have yet to read Normal People, Sally Rooney’s hit novel, or watch its adaptation. I do a lot with Irish literature, but somehow that hype train mostly bypassed me (and I’ll be honest, it’s probably due at least in part to the snobbishness of the rather arbitrary line between literary and mass market fiction–I love some mass market but the fact that this is work for me means I prioritize the literary stuff). Nonetheless, her follow-up, Beautiful World, Where Are You? was chosen by the book club […]



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