Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fascinated, then Restless

We Were Restless Things by Cole Nagamatsu

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Sometimes a book gets packaged as something it’s not, which always does it a disservice since the reader is expecting something different than they get. They may love the new, surprise story or they may be annoyed that what they hoped for wasn’t within the book they picked up. I’m somewhere in the middle with this novel. We Were Restless Things is about a mysterious lake in the woods that only appears to teenager Noemi Amato and occasionally to her friends once Noemi has taken […]

This series is not for me

Still Life by Louise Penny

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Hoo boy…after the high of the previous book I reviewed, this one took a hard turn into disappointment.  It should have been everything I like in a book – a no-nonsense detective, mysterious death, some quirky characters who may or may not be the perpetrator of the crime.  It’s even set in small town Quebec – I’m Canadian, this should be great!  Even most of the reviews were glowing, and as the first book in a series I hoped to be able to settle into […]

Repetitive yet hypnotic, a grand tragedy

The Iliad by Homer

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“The wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfilment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds.” So begins E. V. Rieu’s translation (for Penguin Classics in 1950) of Homer’s Iliad, a prose translation of Greek hexameter verse, telling of the story of an incident, over only a few weeks, in the interminable ten-year Trojan war. We […]

In which the villainess and final boss might be worth rooting for

I'm the Villainess So I'm Taming the Final Boss vols. 1-2 by Anko Yuzu, Sarasa Nagase, Mai Murasaki

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I’ve been following another series in which the protagonist wakes up to realize she’s been reincarnated into a dating sim video game as the villainess and has to use whatever knowledge she has of the game from her previous life to not end up dead/exiled/or whatever other fantasy ending the villainess might end up with. The basic premise of I’m the Villainess So I’m Taming the Final Boss takes that premise and actually gives it some interesting characters and situations that add a little bit […]

Sorry, not the next Bridget Jones.

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

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I really hate when I get so excited about a book and it’s just a dud. And this one was for sure a dud. And it sounded so cute! That title! Nigerian immigrants in Britain! A black Bridget Jones bemoaning the pressures of being single! But it was just . . . uninteresting. I mention Bridget Jones because 50% of the reviews I’ve read of it compare it to Bridget Jones’s Diary, and aside from this also focusing on singleness as a topic, they couldn’t […]

“I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.”

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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I wanted to love this novel. I fully expected to love this novel. At times, I verged on loving this novel. But then, as I got further into it and closer to the end, I gave up the fight. I simply did not like it. I’ve spent the last week pondering why Normal People didn’t work for me. I don’t object to stories about dysfunctional people, and I certainly don’t require a happy ending. But when a novel bums me out, I want it to […]



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