Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Hey Hey He’s Okay…!

A-Okay by Jarad Green

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A-Okay by Jarad Green seemed like it might have a slightly different take on the coming-of-age story. However, it turned more into a “boy doing the coming-of-age things like you would see a girl doing in a book.” In other words, a normal coming-of-age story. It is what everyone has had to deal with while navigating eighth grade. There is personal care, dealing with flaws real and imagined, trying new looks, hurting friends’ feelings, making new friends, and dealing with insecurities. We have seen it […]

A timely mystery written over 50 years ago

The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side by Agatha Christie

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The Mirror Crack’d is a Miss Marple mystery, and while I generally prefer Hercule Poirot, this is a story that made quite an impression on me when I first read it as a kid. I have thought of it often over the years but especially over the past few years for reasons that I cannot divulge since it would totally spoil the mystery. Let’s just say it’s timely and a fun, quick read. Christie published this story in 1962 and it has gotten the film/TV […]

“Friendship can be as deep as the ocean. It’s all a kind of love, and love isn’t any one kind of thing.”

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia

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This book is rightly subtitled: An Adventure. I approve of that. It is an adventure! Reading this book is like bringing childhood and games back into adulthood (though one of the characters is a teenager). And it also has really good character work on top of that. Another way to describe this book is imagine if Ready Player One was set in the real world, and it was full of three-dimensional ladies and also ghosts: Boston multimillionaire dies, leaves game for the public, rewards the winners with […]

The Road to Wellville – TC Boyle (1993)

The Road to Wellville by TC Boyle

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It’s c1909, and a small group of strangers are closing in on the breakfast cereal Mecca, Battle Creek, Michigan. It’s there that the San, Dr. Kellogg’s famous sanitarium awaits some of them, and the fast-paced novel cereal industry awaits others. Will and Eleanor Lightbody have recently gone through a personal tragedy, and are returning (well, Eleanor is) to the San for further treatment, while Will is joining for the first time. Charlie Ossining is a would-be cereal magnate who is bringing his seed money to […]

Hench – Natalie Zina Welschots (2020)

Hench by Natalie Zina Welschots

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Fast becoming a genre of its own, this book further takes on the superheroes as subjects of analysis in fiction mantle for the moment. Hench brings us Anna, a kind of wayward hench in between job…a free lancer by choice, who is playing around with the idea of taking on a permanent post. Her skills involve data analysis and other techie analyst skills. On a new job, she’s is significantly injured by the world’s most famous and possibly most powerful hero, Supercollider, and in her […]

Boy’s Life – Robert McCammon (1991)

Boy's Life by Robert McCammon

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It looks like this book is a lot more well-liked than my impressions of it. It’s a weird combination of IT by Stephen King (well, IT and maybe The Body) and Big Fish (or any other tall-tale infused novel). It’s also similar to the Dan Simmons novel Summer of Night that came out about the same time, almost as if the two authors each decided to write their version of IT as some kind of tribute. Like Summer of Night, I feel like this book […]



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