Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Nobody grabs SecUnits. I hadn’t realized this was a perk until now.”

Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3) by Martha Wells

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When I read this book in January of 2019 it was my least favorite of the original four (spoiler, it still is), mostly because I didn’t connect with the non-Murderbot characters. To a degree that is still true, I feel less connected to them than I did to Mensah’s team in the first or the programmers in the second. But, on a second visit I think that’s probably by design, as Wells is clearly juxtaposing Don Amene and Miki against those other relationships. There is […]

Three Photobook Reviews

Say, Is This the U.S.A. by Erskine Caldwell & Margaret Bourke-White

The Quake of '89 by News Staff of the San Francisco Chronicle

Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America by Nancy Buirski

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These three books sum up the span of photojournalism pretty well, both in time and stylistically. I am not so much an art photography person, nor someone who likes books of just photographs without captions, even if I am a big fan of the photographer. For me, the captions offer the context that make the image more meaningful to me. Say, is this the U.S.A. is a collaborative tour through the USA in 1941, with Margaret Bourke-White providing some great photographs and Erskine Caldwell writing […]

Disney Reimagined for Grown-Ups

Tangled Up in You by Christina Lauren

If the Shoe Fits by Julie Murphy

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The first Meant To Be book I ever got was If the Shoe Fits by Julie Murphy. That’s because it was the first Meant To Be book at all, and as a religious reader of the Twisted Tales, I was curious what an adult contemporary line from Disney would look like. Of course, like many other things, it fell behind, and it wasn’t until a year or so later that I actually picked up a Meant To Be book—and this time it was By the Book by Jasmine […]

“We’re alive!”

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

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I love the idea of retrocausality – the idea that actions in the future influence outcomes in the past. Or, rather, I’m interested in the idea of ripples across time. Like this – something in the future hits the water, and I feel the ripples now, and I felt it when I was 21, and 13, and 7. In other words, some major events impact us throughout our experience of time in ways we don’t understand, both forward and backward. And our ripples mingle with […]

“She might be less than what she had once been, but she was still worth a hell of a lot.”

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

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The older I get, the more out of touch I feel with the twenty-something heroines in certain books. The romance genre especially has a lot of really young heroines, and my 45-yr-old self has a hard time, sometimes, not rolling her eyes at just how young they actually are/act, or how implausibly far away 27 feels at this point. Which is not to say that I am ready to read only the quiet, cozy mysteries that seem most populated by people older  – and still […]

Cozy Mystery in a Quirky Florida Coffeeshop

Cold Brew Corpse by Tara Lush

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Cold Brew Corpse is the second installment in Tara Lush’s Coffee Lover’s mystery series. (Here is my review of the first, Grounds for Murder.) In these cozy books, former Miami newspaper reporter Lana Lewis lives in her quirky hometown – Devil’s Beach, Florida. Since returning to Devil’s Beach after an unexpected divorce, Lana owns and runs Perkatory, a local coffee shop/family business. She solves mysteries while she’s trying to solve the problem of what to do next in her life.Sometimes, there are coffee puns! While […]



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