Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Take a Small Character from The Odyssey and Make Her Shine

Circe by Madeline Miller

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You know how girls get lumped into groups based on their interests as a child? Like, you had horse girls, or gymnastics girls, or gemstone girls. I was a Greek mythology girl. I inherited my copy of D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths from my older sisters and read it so many times it fell apart. When we were assigned The Odyssey in high school, I read all of it. Willingly. And then did it again in college. The Firebrand was one of my favorite books […]

A berry-colored world

My Own World by Mike Holmes

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Some Spoilers below:  I was not sure what I expected with My Own World, but this is an odd book. I am not sure if author Mike Holmes is basing it off of their own experiences, or if it is a universal story about the misfit and how he tries to overcome things.  If you are a 10-to-14-year-old, you might take it at face value: a boy finds/creates a magic world to hide in. It is a world where he is in charge (unlike his […]

Weird West

Lone Women by Victor Lavelle

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“On Tuesday, Adelaide Henry had been a farmer. On Wednesday, she became a fugitive.” This is the story of Adelaide Henry who in 1915 takes off from her home in California in possession of a steamer trunk that has something trapped inside it.  Her parents are dead, and Adelaide is headed to Montana, planning to be a “lone woman” and going to homestead for two years before earning the land she has made viable for herself.  But the something in that trunk is going to […]

“I am still here but the I is different”

Ransom by David Malouf

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Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world. It’s me, an absolute sucker for classical retellings. There’s the obvious vogue of them going on right now, between Jennifer Saint and Claire North and Madeline Miller and Pat Barker &etc, but there’s also plenty of preceding ones, and when I learned (altogether too late) about David Malouf’s Ransom, I had to read it to see if it […]

A Lineage of Madness

The Noh Mask Mystery by Akimitsu Takagi

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An aspiring mystery writer and his childhood friend must join forces to solve the mystery of a string of deaths in a prominent Japanese family that may be the result of an inherited curse. I’ve always enjoyed reading works in translation – they seem to bring you closer to the place in which they are set – but I definitely haven’t read many genre works. As such, I was intrigued by the prospect of this locked room murder mystery, written in 1949 but never before […]

The balance of your magic

Shakti by SJ Sindu

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Shakti is a terribly cute, modern story (several GLBTQ characters and diverse people) but does not dwell on the diversity, but the story of how Shakti herself starts coming of age. This is probably my favorite part as Shakti is representing differences while making it relatable to everyone who reads. Even to the adult-kid-at-heart who is writing this review. SJ Sindu’s book was not an “OMG BEST BOOK EVER!” book, but I liked it and glad I read it now and not when it first […]



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