Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Oh God, I’m Discoursing (Mac Barnett’s MAKE BELIEVE)

Make Believe by Mac Barnett

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Mac Barnett is one of my favorite picture book authors. My favorite book of his, The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown, is one of my favorite picture books period. I reviewed it here for this very reading challenge! So I eagerly preordered my copy of Make Believe, his first book for adults, a book about the craft of writing for children. I got tickets to see the launch event of his book tour, a conversation with Jeff Kinney at Kinney’s indie bookstore in Plainville, MA. […]

Tl:dr – Cannabis turns anxious, uptight ER doc into anxious hoochie daddy who listens to his patients.

Pot Shot by Laura Piper Lee

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For a book I ended up loving, I struggled at a couple of points early in the book. First of all, there is a medical emergency in the first chapter that brings Nomi and Julian back together. That had me putting the book down for a week. The other challenge I had was Julian for the first quarter or so of the book. He is an anxious, uptight, know-it-all and he stressed me out so much I put the book down and almost didn’t pick […]

Funny, Quirky, and Heartfelt

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly

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What an underhyped gem this is. It’s funny, with quirky characters and an emotional core. Set in New Zealand, the book alternates the POVs of the titular siblings, who are biracial, gay, and living together as roommates. It’s a slice of life novel with a large focus on the main characters’ romantic and family relationships. This might be the funniest book I’ve read. Usually when I read something funny in a book I smile or just internally recognize that it’s amusing. It’s fairly uncommon for […]

The Wager by David Grann

The Wager; A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

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Format in which I consumed this book: audiobook Did I like it/love it/hate it? Liked it What’s it about? In the 1740s, a British ship sets sail to try to capture a Spanish galleon filled with treasure. They fail, and become shipwrecked on an island near Argentina and Chile. In the months that follow, the crew and leadership divide into factions and struggle to survive. They manage to scavenge items from their ship and the author sort of makes it seem like they had a […]

“She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.”

The Magician's Daughter by H. G. Parry

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Biddy lives on a small, magically isolated island off the coast of Ireland with her guardian/foster father, Rowan, and his familiar, the rabbit Hutchincroft. No one who doesn’t know that it’s there can find it. While Biddy has no magic of her own, she has grown up with it all around her. Yet magic is fading in the outside world, and far too often, Rowan has to leave Biddy to go to the mainland in bird form to find some small reserves of it. She […]

“I have everything I ever wanted–and it tastes just as delicious as I always imagined.”

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

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I love an unreliable narrator. Whether they are divorced from reality à la Montresor of “The Cask of Amontillado,” deceiving themselves as a defense against trauma, like Pi in Life of Pi, or intentionally deceiving the reader, as in many mysteries I won’t name to avoid spoilers. . .I just can’t get enough of them. What intrigues me about June Hayward (aka Juniper Song) in Yellowface is I’m never certain how much of her own press she buys into. She definitely believes she’s been screwed […]



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