Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A tough read about tough topics…but oh so lovely.

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

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“In each picture, Claude seemed to be shrinking. He had a big family, yes, so it was hard to fit everyone on the page, and he was the littlest of them, true, but Claude got smaller and smaller.” Penn and Rosie always wanted a daughter. But as life would have it—they had five sons. But one night their youngest, Claude informs them that he’d like to be a little girl when he grows up. While their son is advanced, particularly in his vocabulary, they still […]

Yeh it’s pretty scary.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

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I did it – I read another fiction book! Thanks to Caesar’s Wife for continuing to inspire my reading list. Not long after turning the first few pages of The Passage I felt a bit like I’d started a Stephen King book – that’s the closest genre I can think of that relates to this novel. This book, the first in a trilogy, starts in roughly present day USA when the government is rounding up death row inmates to act as lab rats. The experiment […]

How to solve mysteries and alienate coleagues

The Coroner by Matthew Hall

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I listened to this on the very long trip from Vancouver to Edmonton. And it was in some ways the perfect roundtrip book. It was engaging, excellently written dialogue, a complex and interesting protagonist, a case that was interesting, and not too much fluff to distract from the main story. Jenny Cooper was a barrister (lawyer) in the UK until her husband suddenly filed for divorce and she started having severe and debilitating panic attacks. Looking for a fresh start she gets the job as […]

My divine book delivery theory hard at work…

Into The Fire by Amanda Page

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again– books find me when I need them. And this one is the epitome of that theory. I recently found myself at an airshow and at that airshow I met a boy (man). And that boy (works for the Blue Angels) wants to be a fighter pilot. But I know all about pilots. Pilots are (more often than not) cocksure garbage. So I was reticent. More on that later… That being said I love a fighter pilot […]

A glimmer of hope to all the teens who are a little bit off…

The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily by Laura Creedle

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Abelard and Lily are both neurodivergent. Abelard has Asperger’s and Lily has ADHD. Abelard fixes things and Lily destroys them.  After an awkward kiss, a trip to detention and with the aid of a worn copy The Letters of Abelard and Heloise the two fall hard for each other. I thought of Abelard, under the same anxious impulse to touch everything in the world of the here and now that we could feel with our hands. But unlike me, he was thinking about the hidden […]

Like A Wes Anderson Psychological Thriller in Japan

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

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I eagerly picked up Earthlings when I heard it was released. I loved Sayaka Murata’s English language debut, Convenience Store Woman, and was excited to see what the latest translation of her work had to offer. She has a unique and compelling style of prose, and a way of explaining the pressures of Japanese society that is sympathetic to her weird outsiders and totally rational in a slightly twisted way. The cover and back of Earthlings is full of praise for Convenience Store Woman, raving […]



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