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:

A conclusion that doesn’t stick the landing

The Excalibur Curse by Kiersten White

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Kiersten White’s Camelot Rising trilogy has been a fun diversion through other points of the last two rotten years, so I was looking forward to the final book wrapping it all up. The premise thus far has been intriguing, after all: the series focuses on the perspective of Guinevere, newly married to King Arthur and brought to Camelot–except Guinevere is not what she seems, but some sort of fae creature trained by Merlin to aid Arthur in a Britain that is divided between various warring tribes. […]

A placeholder of an Inspector Gamache novel

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

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In a way, it doesn’t help to be reading a series well after some of its books are published when it’s as highly sequential as the Inspector Gamache books are. I’ve also been regularly dipping in and out of novels in Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series, and the serialization is much, much lighter, which means you can read them out of order. No such luck with Louise Penny, which was a downside here because I was pretty sure that Gamache’s new job, as the commander […]

“When has cake ever been for hunger? It’s for flavor, and, in this case, comfort.”

Snacking Cakes by Yossy Arefi

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Okay, my first review of 2022 was a complete bummer, so it’s time for an almost literal palate cleanser, namely the cookbook that’s been the most useful to me in the past six months. Whether you are a fairly novice baker or an seasoned kitchen pro who just likes adding new tricks to your arsenal, Snacking Cakes has something to offer you. The premise is simple: these are all one-bowl cake recipes, and from the start of mixing to when you take them out of the novel, […]

A nightmare before a 1950s Irish Christmas

Snow by John Banville

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Content note: this review will discuss child sexual abuse, which is central to the plot of the novel as well as to the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland (which is also at the center of the novel). A lady has not been able to catch a damned break so far in 2022, so this is the first moment I’ve had to sit down and write a review, of the most recent book that I’ve finished, and goddamn was it a bleak and tough […]

a retelling in conflict with itself

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

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Mild spoilers ahead, though if you’ve read The Great Gatsby…not so much. This was a novel I wanted to like much more than I actually did. The basic premise is a compelling one: what if Jordan Baker, a slight but intriguing character at the margins of The Great Gatsby, was actually an adopted Vietnamese orphan, whose wealth gains her entree into privilege circles without ever fully granting her access to the same privilege that characters like Daisy Buchanan enjoy? Vo constructs a strong narrative voice for Jordan: […]

“I think I saw our ghosts”: a devastating modern WWI novel

Regeneration by Pat Barker

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Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was one of my favorite novels of 2018; I read it after teaching The Iliad for the first time, fascinated by the idea of a novel that told the events of the epic primarily from a feminine point of view: namely, that of Briseis, the Trojan captive that Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over. It was also my first introduction to Pat Barker in general, and was I ever appreciative of that when I learned that Barker had also written a […]



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