Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“When you catch someone lying about a murdered girl, you go ask them why”

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

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CBR15 Passport Challenge – New to me author Five years ago, blonde and beautiful high school girl Andie Bell was murdered, although no one ever found her body, despite careful searching. However, Andie’s boyfriend Sal Singh confessed in a text message to his dad and then committed suicide before he could be arrested by the police. So everyone knows that he did it, and the case is closed. Pippa Fitz-Amobi remembers Sal Singh as a kind and considerate young man, with a promising university career […]

Early 80s Gothic YA

The Callender Papers by Cynthia Voigt

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I picked up The Callender Papers after reading a reference to it, and wondering how it would compare with Cynthia Voigt’s other books.  I read several of her others (Homecoming, Dicey’s Song and Jackaroo) as a teen, and had kind of a love hate relationship with them.  Those books are very much products of their time (the early 1980s) and were very bleak and depressing – think of the avocado green, puke brown and mustard yellow that pervaded the 1970s and you’ll understand the mentality […]

Gentle kids book for dollhouse fans

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden

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I recently discovered the Internet Archive, where one can read older books online by borrowing 1 hour at a time.  This is a fantastic resource for those older books you loved as a kid.  I’ve been obsessed with dollhouses my whole life, and one of my favorite books was Little Plum by Rumer Godden, about little girls in England and their Japanese dolls and dollhouses.  However, as a kid I wasn’t able to get hold of the first book about the dolls, Miss Happiness and […]

Young woman at loose ends finds an unexpected calling – with aliens!

Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

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Totally on accident, I have now read three alien invasion/first contact books in a row. (I did try to read a Nalini Singh in the middle and put it down in annoyance – sorry, gang!) But it was interesting to see the variety of stories: far in the future with scenes set on spaceships and other planets vs. two on Earth. Axiom’s End is the smallest of the stories in scale. Our hero is a young woman named Cora, who becomes pivotal to communicating with […]

Penelope Fitzgerald (1)

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

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Offshore “‘Are we to gather that Dreadnought is asking us to do something dishonest?’ Richard asked.” I first read this book a few years ago in specifically addressing a desire to read all the Booker Prize winners. One of the issues with that task (other being kind of silly and useless) is that it puts some very very different books side by side as if there could be any kind of fair comparison among them. That’s true about the prize itself of course. It’s much harder […]

Review #1: When I Cease to Understand This Book

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

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This book was a curiosity to me – a “blend of fiction and historical fact” is how it was most often described. But how is that going to work? Truthfully, I read almost exclusively genre fiction, and sometimes feel like I’m missing out or disconnected from the real world – I picked this up wondering if it could reconnect me. The publisher of the book says that When We Cease to Understand the World “is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical […]



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