Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Alas, Not As Fun As the Last One, Still Can’t Go Wrong with PM.

The Case of the Crooked Candle by Earle Stanley Gardner

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Quick question for any of you nautical types out there.  You can see from the title that a key clue involves a candle.  Said candle has been burning in an interior cabin on a small yacht, completely unattended for a period of time.  Is this a thing, even in the 1940s?  Seriously, Gardner?  Aren’t those vessels infamously, well, woody?  SMH. OK, aside from blatant safety violations, this case had to do with a lot of trotting back and forth along the Ventura coastline, with the […]

Another bottle of catch-up.

When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller

Show Us Who You Are by Elle McNicoll

Dotson by Grayson Lee White

The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

Boxers by Gene Luen Yang

Little Moments of Love by Catana Chetwynd

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As per usual, I’m awful at keeping up with the review part of the Cannonball Read equation, so here’s another review dump! To begin, let’s discuss When You Trap a Tiger, one which caught my eye primarily because of its cover art and the Newberry Medal. Having liked my last pick from Target’s middle-reader end cap (A Kind of Spark) so much, I’d been making a point to check out when new books get added to the rotation there and this one in particular caught my […]

“Naked truths aren’t always pretty.”

It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover

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A book that has been very, very incorrectly filed under romance. Plot: Lily grew up in a violent household, but now she’s out in the world as a young adult, trying to create a life that is her own, and as different from her youth as possible. By chance she meets a good looking doctor in training and despite his initial aversion to relationships, is suddenly all in. Then there’s her first love, a boy who had escaped an abusive household himself, to live on […]

Who Knew Taking Hostages Could be Heartwarming

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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Anxious People is the best book I’ve read in a long time.  It managed both to make me laugh out loud and start to cry.  Taking place on the eve of New Year’s Eve in a small town in Sweden, it brings together a fairly large cast without losing site of any of them, and making their voices and stories distinct. A burglar attempts to rob a cashless bank for a pittance, then runs away only to stumble into the open house of an apartment […]

Fun with Amelia Peabody

The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters

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Book 6 in the Amelia Peabody series sees the ever intrepid Amelia, husband Emerson and son Ramses dive into peril deep into the deserts of Sudan.  The book follows the family of Victorian era British Egyptologists during a dig in which they attempt to find the whereabouts of two of Emerson’s friends who vanished into the desert 14 years previously, while attempting to find a rumored lost civilization.  Of course Amelia et al find the lost civilization (or are they led to it?), which has […]

“Life is priceless…but life has a cost:” A Look at the Vietnam War Through the Eyes of One Family

Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63 by Marcelino Truong

Saigon Calling: London 1963-75 by Marcelino Truong

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I’d been eyeing this series for several years and finally asked for them for atheist Christmas (the present-focused non-religious version my parents decided to bequeath us). I enjoyed these and they’re definitely worth reading, but they were more removed and distant feeling than I thought they’d be. The first volume follows Truong’s family as they move to South Vietnam for his father to become Prime Minister Diem’s translator. His French mother buckles under the strain of living in the midst of an escalating war, and […]



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