Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A lovely, much-needed escape

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

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When I began this book, I was not sold on the first few chapters.  The style was a little too – overly smarmy asides, self-satisfied attempts at humor – I was annoyed by the cliched characters and benign but still smug silliness.  And then my hometown, Los Angeles, caught fire, and my family evacuated early one morning, and my entire feeling toward it changed. I read this book over three days while waiting for my phone to tell me which of my friends had lost […]

American Royals 2: Electric Boogaloo

American Royals Majesty by Katharine McGee

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I often like to think of books like tv shows. I read books like I watch a show, and there are a lot of parallels between the narrative structure. You have your ‘monster of the week’ chapters that go over something benign, say, throwing a party while mom’s away. You have your dark hidden past that you as the readwatcher get fed drip, say, how you drugged your best friend and she went into a coma as a result, and she’s woken up and you […]

Oh Baby

Prom Mom by Laura Lippman

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Amber is a teenager. She is smart, does well at school, and when her boyfriend takes her to prom she couldn’t be happier. But then her boyfriend leaves to pursue the girl he really wants. Amber doesn’t feel well, goes to their hotel room alone, and gives birth to a premature baby she didn’t know she was carrying. The baby dies, and Amber is sent to juvie for an indeterminate length of time. When she gets out, she restarts her life elsewhere. Years later, in […]

G is for Garbled

Y is for Yesterday (Kinsey Milhone #25) by Sue Grafton

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In 1979, four boys from an elite private school in the fictional town of Santa Teresa film their sexual assault on a classmate. Not long after, the tape goes missing and the person reported to have stolen it turns up dead. Some of the boys are sentenced to prison time. Ten years later, in 1989, one of the boys, Fritz McCabe, is released from prison. He receives letters threatening to release the tape and send him back to prison, unless he and his parents pay […]

Not Berry Nice

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

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1n 1962, a family of Mi’kmaq tribe members from Nova Scotia travel to Maine for the summer to pick blueberries, as they have done for years. Near the end of this particular season, tragedy strikes when their youngest child, Ruthie, disappears without a trace one day. The local police are indifferent and the farmer pretty quickly insists that the family get back to work since their missing daughter “isn’t his problem.” Though the family keeps the search going for a long time, eventually they stop […]

A Wild and Beautiful Work of Art

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

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Kaveh Akbar’s novel Martyr! will stay with me for a long time, I think. It is as flinty as it is lush; austere and cold and wildly warm. Akbar’s main character, Cyrus, is an orphaned man, recovering alcoholic, poet, and perpetual seeker of meaning. He veers wildly between belief and emptiness, the terror of living and his insatiable need to feel its purpose. Although Cyrus is the protagonist, the book’s chapters are a whirlwind of other perspectives and time frames: Cyrus’s Iranian mother–killed when her […]



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