Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

He’s like a star, his gravity pulling Jordan out of his own orbit into Jamie’s.

Last First Kiss by Julian Winters

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Julian Winters’s Last First Kiss has some really excellent yearning. Jordan is trying to prove himself in his new role at the family event planning business and humor his mother by going on a blind date that might be the start to his forever love story. But his cousin’s best friend, Jamie, is making both of those things difficult. Jamie, in the guise of practicing, gave Jordan his first kiss. Jordan has never forgotten it, and maybe neither has Jamie. Jordan is trying to plan […]

“A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick

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When I was young, my mother had a Montgomery Ward credit card. This is not newsworthy, except at some point, in my late teens or early twenties, Montgomery Ward went belly up and my mother’s reaction was…outsized. It’s not like we shopped there a lot; it was a discount department store, the middle ground between someplace like Nordstrom and K-Mart. But then she reminded me that she had a credit card to that store. In her name. That’s how she said it. “It’s in my […]

Back to Yale, back to Yale, to prove to dad that I won’t fail (sung in Billy Madison “back to school” tune)

Ninth House (Alex Stern #1) by Leigh Bardugo

Hell Bent (Alex Stern #2) by Leigh Bardugo

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I don’t know you guys are going to believe this, but I made up that title. It’s not a real song. I was just thinking of “Back to Yale”, since this book is set at Yale, and my brain did the rest! As my boss said today, “your words aren’t wordsing”, so we’ll see how this goes! I read Ninth House almost exactly three years ago. I think I even reviewed it here for whatever CBR we were on in January 2023. I really liked […]

Playing Darkly

Darkly by Marisha Pessl

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I am a big fan of Marisha Pessl’s writing, Special Topics in Calamity Physics was a book that reminded me of The Secret History except a lot more fun. Night Film felt like a noir detective novel but more.  Now with Darkly, it is yet another mystery novel and yet so much more. Right off the bat we are introduced to Arcadia “Dia” Collins who basically runs her mother’s antique shop (as her mother and the old doddering couple seem to just bumble around adorably). Her world gets […]

Love is in the Cards

Heart the Lover by Lily King

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I don’t remember a ton about Writers and Lovers, Lily King’s prior novel featuring the protagonist Casey Peabody. Heart the Lover starts before the events of Writers and Lovers and ends after, making it sort of a prequel and sequel in one. At the start, Casey is a university student, majoring in English and working her way through college after giving up her scholarship by quitting the golf team. She meets two brainy, literary boys in Sam and Yash, best friends who live together in […]

“There are so many stories, big and small. We need to tell them all.”

The Hidden Book by Kirsty Manning

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The Hidden Book is told in alternating timelines. In one, a young man named Nico is incarcerated at Mauthausen*, a German concentration camp in northern Austria, near Linz. He manages to befriend a young village girl named Lena who lives with her parents and her developmentally disabled sister just outside the gates of the camp. Nico’s friend Matteo is the camp photographer, and is tasked with documenting the activities of the camp for some of the SS officers. Nico and Matteo conspire to smuggle a […]



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