Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“What happens to all that leftover love?”

After you'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell

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After boarding a train from King’s Cross to Edinburgh on a whim to see her sisters, Alice Raikes makes an abrupt about turn and heads back home. Shortly after, she steps in front of a car. She’s taken to hospital, but she’s in a coma and it doesn’t look good. What did she see at that Scottish train station that made her leave so suddenly? Had she tried to commit suicide? Shifting points of view, from Alice’s present, to past, to her family’s thoughts and […]

Wheel Keeps on Turning

Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor

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In the last year, I’ve made it a point staying on top of the hot book du jour that caught my fancy. Most of the time, the hype is so suffocating, I have to put it down and come back to it. There’s nothing wrong with the book, but after hearing for months about how life altering it is, the expectations become impossible to reach. I usually come back to those books and wind up enjoying them independent of noise. I’m also trying hard not […]

When an Endearment is a Turn Off

Before Girl by Kate Canterbary

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This one definitely wasn’t for me. A few weeks ago, someone mentioned The Worst Guy on Twitter and said that the hero in that one had falsely been classified as an asshole when he was grumpy. Of course, I went to Goodreads quickly to see if any of my friends had read it, and saw Emmalita had given it positive feedback. In fact I enjoyed it so much, I wanted to pick up something else by her, especially since there are so many couples in […]

A Picture Worth an Entire Book

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline

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  “Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They’re passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.” With these words Christina Olson introduces herself in A Piece of the World. It is a historical fiction, which plausibly imagines the story of Christina Olson, the […]

Not your mama’s Wizard of Oz

Dorothy Must Die (Dorothy Must Die book #1) by Danielle Paige

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“[My mother] told me that, whatever anyone at school said, a trailer was where I lived, not who I was. She told me that it was the best home in the world because it could go anywhere.” And what better place to go than the colorful, magical land of Oz? But we learn quickly that this ain’t your mama’s Oz. Dorothy Must Die is the first of a series of novellas about Amy, from…(I’ll give you one guess). She’s in high school with a mother […]

Thought provoking novel about race and privilege in the US

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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This is a thought provoking book about two generations of a family: identical twin sisters who each have one daughter born in the early 1960s. The twins are both Black, but one makes the decision to pass as white while the other stays within the Black community. The interactions and repercussions on their daughters are really interesting, and the book is beautifully written. The twins (Stella and Desiree) are born in a Louisiana community entirely of light skinned Black people, and are traumatized at a […]



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