Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Intimacies, or, How Lipgloss Led to my 13th CBR Review

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

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I hadn’t heard of Katie Kitamura until there was a small online to-do about her lipgloss. Kitamura, in an interview with New York Magazine, included a $24 lipgloss in a listicle of “15 items she can’t live without.” My regular internet reading brought to me a Hot Take about Katie’s love of this lipgloss, and here’s the Hot Take: including this very silly item in her list is tone deaf (lipgloss in this economy!?), and furthermore, lipgloss has nothing to do with literature, so it’s […]

A delightful scifi Sherlock retelling with aliens and disability rep.

A Study in Black Brew by Marie Howalt

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They say life is a string of chances held together with grit and guided by passion, and who am I to disagree? If you are looking for a retelling to read on Sherlock Holmes Day (May 22), I would recommend Marie Howalt’s A Study in Black Brew. It’s a scifi setting, on a queer-normative world with multiple species. The plot is pretty straightforward as a retelling of A Study in Scarlett (except no dogs, or helpless pets are killed), but Howalt has made choices that […]

Where Men Are the Worst, and Menopause Gives You Magic Powers

The Change by Kirsten Miller

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In a quiet Long Island town, three women of a certain age discover that they have more power than they ever thought possible. Jo, a former hotel executive, owns a women-only gym, and has hot flashes that can literally set things on fire. Nessa is a retired nurse who can hear the dead calling to her and see their unsettled shades. And Harriet? Well, Harriet hasn’t left her house in months, her garden has turned into a wild place full of unsettling plants, and there […]

I give up

Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts

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I think La Nora’s next book should be about serial killers who flip houses and not the cops who catch them. There were two places in Hidden Nature where it felt like Nora Roberts was interested in what she was writing – the home renovation and the icky serial killers. Ok, there was a third area where she perked up – when she was writing about dogs. But, I think we all agree that the dogs and the serial killers should be kept separate. Her […]

“Bourbon in the blood and blood in the bourbon”

The Bourbon Thief by Tiffany Reisz

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This book feels like a throw back – the characters, the melodrama and everything of the main story honestly felt like they were from a novel written in the 90s, back when Danielle Steele reigned. After Cooper McQueen discovers that the woman he brought home last night is about to walk out with a million dollar bottle of bourbon, she offers him a trade – she will tell him a story and then, she will leave with the bottle. Being bored and rich, he decides […]

Sandwich

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

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Sandwich takes place over the course of a one-week family vacation on Cape Cod, at the same cottage our protagonist’s family has been visiting for one week every year. This time, our heroine Rocky is there with her two grown children, and her son’s girlfriend, her husband Nick, and a few days overlap with her parents – thus, she is the sandwich generation, with kids on one side and parents on the other. Also, she makes a lot of sandwiches for the beach days, because […]



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