Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Book Exchange Rules! and food mysteries are mostly fun.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai

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Yay for book exchange and holiday travel reading! There was no note, so I’m not sure who to thank, but still, thanks! Nailed that one. Cozy has been having a moment (a trend I’m mostly down with), and The Kamogawa Food Detectives is sort of cozy, but that label doesn’t quite fit. It’s a food based mystery series (in this case, almost a sequence of sort of related short stories; but also there is a sequel) featuring a father-daughter detective agency restaurant, in which the […]

Silly gags abound but questions are building faster than goblins on meth

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman

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You know how sometimes the next book in the series isn’t as good as the one before it? Carl’s Doomsday Device does not fit in that category.  It continues to be uproariously fun ala Carl having to remove all magic items and running around naked because even his boxers are magic.  However, the questions continue to build.  Why are some NPCs aware and others not?  How mentally stable are the previous crawlers that become NPCs? What is going on in the broader universe that is impacting […]

Broken Towers

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

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First of all, I’m really happy to be back and looking forward to doing this this year! My reading outside of work has been abysmal lately, so I’ve decided to join Cannonball Read again to have more motivation. The one thing that worked last year, despite the general slacking off, were audiobooks, or better, one series of audiobooks: I’ve fallen into the Rivers of London series and the combination of Ben Aaronovitch’s writing and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s voice acting is just excellent. I’ve just finished the […]

It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn

The Legacy of Arniston House by T.L. Huchu

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After defecting to English magic (and higher pay), ghost-talker Ropa is ready to pack up her grandmother and leave Edinburgh behind entirely. But as tensions mount in the city and a mysterious enemy becomes more visible, Ropa’s grandmother is murdered – and Ropa is considered the primary suspect. In the fourth book of the Edinburgh Nights series, author Huchu really begins to weave together the broader conflict brewing in the world of Scottish magic and Ropa’s personal journey, bringing to fruition many of the things […]

American Royals

American Royals by Katharine McGee

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This book starts out in a way that is very Ella Enchanted. There is an introduction that you can hear being read in a faux british person’s voice describing how *obvious* you knew how after the revolution George Washington became king, and jumps in from there. The story revolves around the three princlings.The big (only?) focus of them is basically love and dating. For real, it’s all they talk about. The world building is interesting. Imagining a world where america set up a similar system […]

Starting my 2025 reading year on a high note

Into the Woods by Jenny Holiday

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This was an ARC I won from the author in a Facebook contest (!) I know, right? My opinions are my own. Gretchen Miller is a self-proclaimed badass, and she’s not lying. After growing up with financial instability, food insecurities and a lot of general uncertainness due to her father’s unpredictability, she became determined never to have to depend on anyone ever again and started earning and saving her own money as a teenager, squirrelling it away for a future project. That project became a […]



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