Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Like Lord of the Flies at Disneyland

FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven

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If you strand a bunch of (mostly) 20 something year old adults who work in a theme park for 35 days during a natural disaster, what do you think would happen? If you’re hoping for Temptation Island level hijinks, you’ll be sorely disappointed. But if you’re leaning toward murder and heads on a stick level violence, then this is the book for you! Think Lord of the Flies, but with adults and multiple tribes. This book works for a lot of reasons. First, you have […]

One of My Year’s Best

Circe by Madeline Miller

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Whether or not you know anything about Greek Mythology is irrelevant when it comes to reading Circe. You could go in cold, like I did, or with a vast knowledge of the myths. If, like me, you thought of Greek myths as being about otherwordly beings who have little in common with mortals, you may be pleasantly surprised by this book. Miller makes the gods human, accessible, fallible, and vulnerable. And I guess anyone who knows anything about these stories might already know that, but […]

*Sigh*

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

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In John Scalzi’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye, the moon has turned to cheese, what now? So, When the Moon Hits Your Eye did not work for me for a couple of reasons. First, the structure of the story, looking at an event from a variety of perspectives as they experience it, is one that is hard for me to stay engaged with. Second, I had a hard time reading this story in this particular moment. I found reading about governments responding competently and listening […]

Lifeform

Lifeform by Jenny Slate

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It’s tough to write about this book because I’m still grappling with how out there the voice is. My opinion about Jenny Slate remains sky high, but she is… very LA. Good! That’s her style and she absolutely dominates with it. This book is very poetic, which is not my jam but which I enjoyed through her performance. This book is unvarnished, exciting, and crazy, and I mean all of those things in a good way. At this point I’m out of things to say […]

It Starts With the Funeral

Four Weekends and a Funeral by Ellie Palmer

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There’s a moment quite late in Four Weekends and a Funeral that pushed this contemporary romance from a 4 to a 5 star read. For a good chunk of the book, grief and guilt have been bubbling under the surface of Ali’s life. Several things come to a head and she has an emotional moment in The Mall of America, followed by an intervention by her two best friends. Ellie Palmer gives Ali this moment in the aftermath that beautifully captures friendship. We eat too […]

I Love Swiss Cheese But Not As a Plot Device

The Overnight Guest by Heather Gudenkauf

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True Crime writer Wylie’s life is a mess: she’s divorced, she’s having a fight with her teenage son, and there’s a book that needs finishing, so she does what any sane person would do: rent the house where the crime she’s writing about took place (the place has been uninhabited for twenty years, but is somehow still livable, unvandalised, and connected to the grid) so she can finish her novel. Of course, a snow storm rears its head, cutting off the electricity. Of course, she […]



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