Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You can’t know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain.”

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

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I love a multigenerational family tale, one that sweeps across history and continents. And in that, this novel succeeds, with lovely writing, to boot. The story of the Cassar family is a fictional version of Messud’s own history, and hinges on the point at which her French Algerian family grapples with the history (and future) of colonialism around World War II. Messud’s own great grandfather wrote an in-depth family history, which would later take Messud (and her fictional counterpart within this novel) 20 years to […]

Believing Women … When You Know the Accused

The List by Yomi Adegoke

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Best for: Those interested in stories that explore questions of media ethics, morality, how to determine who to believe. In a nutshell: Ola (a journalist partly known for here work on #MeToo-esque stories) and Michael (a media presenter) are two people living in London. They are set to get married in a month, with friends and family coming into town. They are Instagram famous, and held up as an example of #BlackLove. Then The List is posted to Twitter, which accuses 40 men of various […]

King’s Dozen

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

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You Like It Darker is a collection of twelve short stories by horror master Stephen King. Five of the stories are being published for the first time, while the other seven previously ran in magazines or on King’s websites. All twelve stories were new to me. The collection’s title would seem to indicate that King has ratcheted up his penchant for the macabre, but if anything I thought he used an ironically light touch for most of the twelve stories. Though there are of course […]

Food is home

Home in a Lunchbox by Cherry Mo

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Home in a Lunchbox is one of those picture books that is both sweet, silly, and heartwarming, with a little sadness. Or at least, at first. Cherry Mo’s young narrator  has moved from Hong Kong to America. She only knows a few words of English (hello, thank you, I don’t know, and the important one, toilet), makes mistakes, does not fit in in class and feels hopeless. That is until she opens her lunchbox and familiar sights and smells come out. She will soon learn, […]

Forward and Backwards

Flipping Forward Twisting Backward by Alma Fullerton

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When I say Flipping Forward Twisting Backward by Alma Fullerton has a classic feeling story with a little bite, I mean the story might feel a bit “old hat” in today’s themes that are a bit more mature, or “updated.” What I mean is that this book feels like something I would have read from ages (at least 8) to a (younger) 12.  And when I was growing up, there were the Big Four Themes. The first was divorce, the second a friend having diabetes, the […]

Fun Dogs and Funky Grandmothers

Dalmartian: A Mars Rover's Story by Lucy Ruth Cummins

Gaga Mistake Day by Emma Straub, Susan Straub

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Books are my thing. In my high school yearbook I was the one to be found reading. (Okay, it might have been because nobody on the yearbook team really knew me, but they also were not wrong). And this would make most think that I have never met a book I have not wanted to read. Trust me, I’ve met plenty (I’m looking at you self-published Zombie Christmas trees….Though I did try three pages…). Some days these “don’t wants” never get read, some are started […]



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