Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Letters from the Winter of Life

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

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I almost wish I had waited until January to read this, so I could start my year with a 5-star read, which this was—absolutely and unexpectedly. The idea of an epistolary novel rarely appeals to me, but I’m so glad I gave this one a try. Our main letter writer is Sybil, who is 73 when the book starts, but it spans several years. She writes to just about anyone and everyone, including her brother, a neighbor, the son of a former colleague, a customer […]

“It’s always now. It’s never now.”

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

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The year is nearly gone, and I’m yet to make my first Cannonball17 post.  Scrolling through my list of 2025 reads, when I saw this I knew it was the one. This is a slim novel, nothing much happens. It took me longer than expected to read, because my mind kept spinning away, following one of its spidersilk threads off into the universe.  Six people orbit the earth sixteen times over the course of a day, their thoughts spiralling from the mundane to the astounding […]

Wait. They Did NOT Just Bury Her Sitting Up.

Blessed Are the Dead by Malla Nunn

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Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper was brought up under rough circumstances in the slums of Johannesburg, South Africa.  Although mixed race, he presents as white, and managed as such to serve in the military for South Africa during WWII.  But since then, he has lost and then recovered his white papers in the turbulent years of the beginning of the apartheid period of the 1950s, due to the patronage of the Afrikaner Colonel van Niekirk, for entirely selfish reasons.  And with Cooper comes his best friend, […]

Breaking the cycle of abusive power

The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem

The Jasad Crown by Sara Hashem

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I was surprised how much I liked this duology, especially the first one in the series, given that it involved a genocide and two main characters that represented the oppressor and oppressed, a dynamic I usually stay far away from in historical fiction (and yet, between this and the Daevabad trilogy, it isn’t a dealbreaker in fantasy for me). I also appreciated that this series didn’t stretch into a trilogy needlessly and there was more than enough going on to justify a duology. Ten years […]

Roscoe & Ivy stories

The Clean-Up Monster (Roscoe & Ivy) by Eleni Tassopoulous and Danamarie Hosler

My Dinosaur Shoes (Roscoe & Ivy) by Eleni Tassopoulous and Danamarie Hosler

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My Barefoot Press dealer gave me several books recently. Between them and an older package I  had just gotten to, I was in deep with board books. Now, I was not the audience for Eleni Tassopoulous’s Roscoe & Ivy series, but I grew to appreciate them. The Clean-Up Monster (Roscoe & Ivy) is illustrated by Danamarie Hosler. This is, without any background, chunky to read. There was something off to it. My first thought was that it was a translation. But research showed (and my […]

It Feels Both Unique and Original and Yet Almost Primordial

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

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Of all the books I read this year, this is one I’m most likely to reread before any of the others. There is so much violence and truly disturbing scenes and yet, it is also bizarre, funny and emotional, making me tear up at various scenes. Carolyn and her siblings were all adopted by their father years ago, and each was placed in charge of one collection of the library or area of expertise. Reading outside your curriculum is strictly forbidden. Now, Father is missing […]



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