Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I wrote the review ages ago, but left the wording in present tense

This Is How I Say I Love You: Little Bunny’s Bedtime Story Told in English and Chinese by Dayong Gan

The Most Beautiful Painting: Discover the Mystery of Chinese Script (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition) by Yajuan Lu and Jian Li

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As a kid I remember checking out several folktale books from the school library. As an adult I learned to appreciate them in a way I never could have as a kid. One thing was how similar stories can pop up in different cultures, or how stories can be adapted for another setting. The other is you can learn about a country as well. And while I am not sure if the two books in this review will fit any of the above categories, or […]

Life, love and rock climbing

Kirby's Lessons for Falling [in Love] by Laura Gao

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Kirby’s Lessons for Falling [in Love] was neither loved nor hated. I mean, Laura Gao did a lovely job of story, text and art, but at the same time, I was thinking, “Something is missing.” It moved quickly, has some new takes on familiar themes, and for the most part I like how things turned out. Yet, giving it a score is hard as I loved most of it, but there were places I did not. Probably why I am having trouble figuring out a […]

It’s a love story, baby, just say yes

It's a Love Story by Annabelle Monaghan

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Dear authors: please stop writing in present tense. I hate it. That said, I didn’t hate this book. I wish it hadn’t been written in present tense, but whatever. I’ll let that go. Mostly. Jane is a former child star turned… I’m not really sure. Is she a movie producer? It’s unclear. She works at a production company and does something with getting movies made. I’ll admit that either it wasn’t explicit in the book or I wasn’t paying attention, or more likely, I don’t […]

My Second Tove Jansson and the Newest Murderbot

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

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Platform Decay by Martha Wells At this point, the Murderbot books are basically comfort reads. If you’ve read enough of them, you have a general idea of what’s going to happen and how things will end up, always accompanied by a healthy dose of snark and sarcasm from Murderbot. In this one, we start off with Murderbot tagging along with Three, another “rogue” SecUnit, at the start of a rescue mission. Said rescue mission goes awry pretty quickly, because this is a Murderbot book. At this point […]

“The sun is up, the skies are blue, and murder is in the air.”

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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A few years ago, it felt like everyone and their neighbor were reading The Thursday Murder Club. I was intrigued but hadn’t pulled the proverbial trigger. But here we are and the time has arrived for me to dig in to the story of a group of friends in a retirement village who investigate cold cases for fun, and the new member they invite into their ranks, and the murder that happens that lets them jump into their first in real time crime solving.    This was just the right book to break a two-month reading slump. It […]

A family too annoying to care about

These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean

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I saw These Summer Storms (2025) by Sarah MacLean on NPR’s Favorite Books List. I’ve never read anything by Sarah MacLean, but I’m a fan of romance novels, and this one seemed interesting enough. So I picked it up. Unfortunately, I found this one more disappointing than not. After a fun beginning, the plot did not feel believable, and I didn’t like the characters. By the end of the book, I was curious how it was going to end, but I was also ready for it to be […]



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