Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Macho, macho man. I gotta be a macho man.

The Burnt Toast B&B (Bluewater Bay Book 5) by Heidi Belleau and Rachel Haimowitz

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CBR16 Bingo: Vintage Derrick is a screw up, or at least he thinks he is. Laid off from his logging job, he moved back home to his parents’ house, which is also a B&B in the small Pacific Northwest town of Bluewater Bay. Losing his parents in a car accident was devastating, and watching their dreams crumble beneath his incompetent fingers is too much to bear. Derrick barely maintains the B&B and relies heavily on Jim, his ex, for emotional support and occasional dog sitting […]

Updating the classics

Much Ado About Nada by Uzma Jalaluddin

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Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Retelling (modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion) CBR16 Bingo: Bollywood (set in Canada with desi protagonists) The absolutely last place Nada Syed wants to be is the big annual Muslim convention in downtown Toronto. She is nearly 30 years old, single and lives at home with her parents and two brothers. If she goes to the convention, there is a high chance that she’ll run into her old mentor, formerly her mother’s best friend. She might also run into her mentor’s […]

Quick Thinking (Also: yay, full cannonball!)

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

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River Cartwright is an MI5 prodigy; his grandfather was a famed higher-up in the organisation and he’s set to follow in the man’s footsteps. He’s nearly done with his training when his final exercise goes drastically wrong and before long, he is banished to Slough House, an MI5 outpost where those who have fallen into disgrace are sent. It’s unclear what the Slow Horses, as Slough House’s employees are known, do all day, except that it is tedious and senseless work. But then a young […]

Clown Vs Teenagers

There's No Way I'd Die First by Lisa Springer

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What happens when an aspiring teenage movie critic hosts a Halloween party at her isolated mansion home, invites her friends (and some quasi-friends who are teenage influencers), and sets up a fun “game” involving a creepy clown, but the clown turns out to be like – psychotic?  Well, you get There’s No Way I’d Die First by Lisa Springer, where our heroine Noelle gets to prove she has the chops to be a Final Girl, and show there is no way she’d die first. This […]

Love & Football

The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata

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I may have had the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce romance in my head when I decided to read a football romance. Also, my friend recommended The Wall of Winnipeg and Me (2023) by Mariana Zapata, and she usually has pretty good recommendations. This was a fun romance. It generally kept my interest, and I enjoyed reading it. Vanessa Mazur had a pretty terrible childhood, but she’s managed to make a pretty good life for herself. She wants to start a graphic design company, but has worked for the […]

The New Gang in Town

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman

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Recently, I had the chance to listen to Richard Osman give a talk at a local bookstore about his new novel We Solve Murders. The book also marks the launch of a new series for Osman, as he (temporarily, he assures us) puts aside the Thursday Murder Club. One of the themes Osman constantly returned to was that, to him, character is much more important than the plot to a mystery novel’s success. Indeed, unlike many mystery writers, Osman swears he has no solution in […]



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