Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Cutting Room Floor

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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Montserrat is a sound editor at a second-rate Mexican film studio, struggling to stay in the good graces of her sexist boss and living life mostly on her own. Aside from her cancer-stricken sister, her only real company is her childhood friend Tristan, a former soap opera star now resorting to voice-over work to make ends meet. The relationship between the two friends has a lived-in, comfortable feel, though Montserrat’s long-standing crush on Tristan is an unacknowledged open secret between the pair. They’re the kind […]

Mason Bloom Takes Charge of his One Goddamn Life was never meant to be a romance.

Off Plan: A Whispering Key Novel by May Archer

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And if the Universe was sentient enough to be sending out warnings to certain people, I could only conclude it hated me, because it hadn’t sent me a warning for any damn thing, ever, as evidenced by the fact that I lived on a forgotten island with my hick cousins and my wacky uncle, and hadn’t had sex since January. ― May Archer, Off Plan “No,” I resumed walking. “I’m not up in his business either. Not like that. We’re friends. We decided.” “You realize […]

The Swining Sixties

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

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Yeah, I made a typo, but it’s staying. London, 1967. Bass player Dean Moss is flat-out broke, homeless, and ready to give up on his dreams and head back home to find some dreary menial job for the rest of his life, when he meets a music producer named Levon. Levon hasn’t had much luck so far and this is his last stab at success, so he sets Dean up with folk singer and pianist Elf (short for Elizabeth Frances), drummer Griff and guitarist Jasper. […]

“Separately, each cloud can block the wind. Together, we might determine its flow.”

Kill Her Twice by Stacey Lee

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Sisters May and Gemma Chow are working hard to keep their family afloat while their father is away being treated for tuberculosis. When they discover the body of Lulu Wong, a former classmate and rising Hollywood star on the outskirts of Chinatown, they set out to solve the mystery of her death. I’m always on the lookout for historical fiction that centers the experience of people who were marginalized during the era of the setting, because to see history through their eyes is usually completely […]

Kill Your Darlings

Bunny by Mona Awad

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Bunny started out really strong for me, it ended okish…I think…but I mostly wanted to get off the ride once we hit the middle, and the middle is LONG. We follow Sam in her final year at Warren College (eyeroll for the cuteness there) as she’s finishing up her MFA.  Much like Mean Girls and Clueless have very clear cliques that don’t necessarily exist in the natural world quite so clearly, they exist here at Warren.  We have the sweet stoner poet Jonah,  Ava, Sam’s […]

Romance and Reality TV

The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren

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Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of writing partners and best friends, Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. I didn’t know this book was by a writing team until after I finished, but it sounds like a fun idea. And then you get to do press with your best friend, which would be way more fun than traveling around the country by yourself. Anyway, they wrote The True Love Experiment (2023), a contemporary romance novel about a reality television dating show. Now, my husband and I have been a […]



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