Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Keeper of Lost Things kinda loses its way…

The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

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During a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I decided I wanted, for fun, for my fiancee to pick a book for me at random based solely upon the cover. Loving flowers, like she does, she naturally picked this one: The Keeper of Lost Things. Initially, in the more grounded beginning, I was liking this book. A man who lost his wife, as well as something special she’d given him to hold onto, decides to devote his life to picking up any and every lost […]

Sad about not liking this one

The First Sister by Linden Lewis

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2.5/5 rounded up. I really wanted to like this one but I mostly did not. Cool world, concepts and even character ideas but the writing didn’t follow through. *Sigh* I got this as a post release ARC from Netgalley (my first! I’m still figuring out how it works and if I actually want to do it). This obviously did not affect what I am about to say lol Full review: I wanted this to work for me so much. This really should be right up […]

The Big Daddy of WW2 Spy Fiction

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

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Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over. It seems like every other historical fiction book being released these days is about women who were spies and saboteurs during the occupation of France in World War Two. […]

Wild Ride

Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover

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Y’all this was wild. It felt like getting wine drunk and watching a lifetime movie and you have to yell at the tv. Was it entertaining? Yes. Was it entertaining to me the way I think the creator intended? Ummm…….. So in Ugly Love we have a story in two parts. The first part follows Tate, a woman who moves in with her pilot brother and gets involved in a sexual relationship with the man next door. The man, Myles, tells her he can’t and […]

Snow on a cover makes me emotionally nervous

Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt

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Orbiting Jupiter This was a short novel, bordering on novella. I don’t know where it was recommended to me but I know that any book with a cover in winter is almost certainly going to be sad so I was at least somewhat prepared. The book is from the perspective of a young boy, Jack, whose family brings in a foster kid, Joseph. Joseph is 14 and was placed in foster care after a violent and drug induced incident with a teacher. Joseph also has […]

“My father was a king, and the son of kings”, but nothing more

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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Another volume in my Iliad exploration, I missed The Song of Achilles when it first came out in 2012, garnering superlatives and awards, so have come to it rather late. Miller’s book is not a retelling of the Iliad, although she does, of course, deal with its events in the course of the novel, but The Song of Achilles is more concerned with Achilles and his relationship with Patroclus, and fully illuminates the other man as a real person, albeit one who is always in […]



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