Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The author and their work

A Perfect Mistake by Melanie Conklin

When You Have to Wait by Melanie Conklin

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After reading Counting Thyme by Melanie Conklin, I went on to read their A Perfect Mistake. I had wanted to reverse the reading, as I had seen an online reader copy of A Perfect Mistake ages ago, but lost my link. I then said, “Hello Library of mine. Do you have Melanie Conklin’s books?” One interlibrary loan request for each later, I had the first and the most recently published (with book four, Crushed, out in July 2024) in hand. I will go back and […]

Little box of crayons, a lot of hope

Simone by Viet Thanh Mguyen

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I was expecting Simone to be an immigration story or one about fitting in when you look different. I was surprised to learn that the book was about strength in the middle of a traumatic event. This makes Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book relatable on several levels. Anyone can have a tragic event occur. Now, ours might not be a forest fire, but we could have had a flood, a loss of a home, or a death in the family. Simone (the character) is a young […]

RIP Celestin you would have loved r/Brochet

Bitter Promise by Ila Dell Youngblood

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Though Micaela falls in love with pirate’s son Dominique, she agrees to marry Celestin, the man she’s been betrothed to since she was a child. I went into this book expecting a historical romance – I was not aware that the Baroness Pontalba was a real person with a lengthy Wikipedia entry, and so that the story does not necessarily have a happy ending. In that light the way this book is written, with plenty of emphasis on the more mundane up ands downs of […]

“Women were built to endure the rules men make.”

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

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I would think it a real challenge to make a story about women suffering under abusive husbands and the difficulties of living in the caste system in India incredibly funny, but this book managed to do that. The humor is dark, but the characters (mostly women) are authentic, interesting and very relatable as they try to navigate the world of men while finding ways to advocate for themselves in a world that doesn’t want them to do much at all. Geeta’s awful husband disappeared 5 […]

Winning Formula

Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball by Luke Epplin

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When the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians (the team has since been renamed the Guardians) met in the 2016 World Series, most of the media attention centered on the fact that the Cubs stood to win their first championship in over a century. But baseball fans knew that both teams in that series were hoping to end droughts. Cleveland’s last World Series win was all the way back in 1948. Luke Epplin’s book “Our Team” tells the story of that title-winning team through the lens […]

An archaeologist, an amusement park employee, a talking pig. Everyone is doing their best.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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In 2020, when many of us began working from home, I started listening to a podcast series called The Happiness Lab. The creators had produced a string of episodes dedicated to coping with the pandemic, and one episode in particular stuck with me. The theme was that, at some point, we would come out on the other side of our current global challenge, and one way to get through it was to think about what kind of story we want to be able to tell […]



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