Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Damon Salvatore and gladiators

We Who Will Die by Stacia Stark

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I have started a few books in the last month or two that I fully intend to finish but they aren’t quite holding my attention and I keep starting new books rather than going back to them. So I feel like I have been struggling to get through novels but then I look back over my recent reads and realize, it’s not been that bad. Anyway, I was both interested in this book and skeptical because sometimes the booktok hype is just too much. However, […]

Make a Place for This One

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Gladstone

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The freshly minted Pulitzer Prize winner for best nonfiction, There Is No Place for Us: Homelessness in America, is absolutely heartbreaking and terrifying–but I couldn’t look away from the text for the 24 hours it took me to read Brian Gladstone’s book. The scope is simultaneously wide and narrow. Gladstone follows five families of various shapes and sizes in Atlanta in the early 2020s. Each of these families have their own shapes, sizes, textures, and personal challenges, but they all have one thing in common: […]

The Hubris and Entitlement of Alchemists

Inkpot Gods by Seanan McGuire

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I have read most of what Seanan McGuire has written, including under her pen name Mira Grant, so of course I jumped at Netgalley’s offer of an ARC of Inkpot Gods, the fourth of her Alchemical Journeys novels (she also did a spin off of this series, writing some of the often referenced children’s books that alchemist Asphodel Deborah Baker used to share her studies in plain sight). As far as I am tracking, this series is intended to be five books total, and this […]

To Be Young, Bewildered, and Black

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

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Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry, whose famous aphorism popped into my head more than once while I was reading The Wilderness.  Flournoy has given us a portrait of young Black women’s struggle to make meaning, starting in their twenties and progressing to middle age. These women are, indeed, gifted in many ways, but it doesn’t spare them the journey we all take from youth to maturity. Their Blackness means the challenges are different, and sometimes greater. “Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness” by mypubliclands is licensed under CC BY […]

The Only Mystery is, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke

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This book is nothing. I know that’s a bold claim, but I’ve racked my brain since finishing The Ending Writes Itself, the new book by Evelyn Clarke, a pen name for the collaborative work of V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, and I can’t come up with anything that accurately categorizes it. The publishers call it a mystery novel, and on the surface it’s easy to see why. It’s about a dead mystery writer, after all, though his death is not mysterious at all. He’s drowned […]

You can’t be cool with a bowl cut…. or can you?

Don't Cause Trouble by Arree Chung

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Don’t Cause Trouble by Arree Chung is currently available, but I read as an online reader copy found deep in my saved links. It is a fun book about not fitting in for the reader ages 8 to 12- (young)-13. It is not overly an in depth story, but a reflective story that is relatable for most. The illustrations are pretty much what you see from the cover, but there are more details on the actual internal panels. It is still minimal in fine detailing, […]



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