Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I gave Cork O’Connor a try … turns out, I’m just not that into him

Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger

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William Kent Krueger seems to be very popular among many bookish folks that I generally respect. I have heard so much praise for his most recent novel, This Tender Land, and his Cork O’Connor series has been fairly positively reviewed. I imagined him to be a bit like Peter Heller, whose writing is strongly impacted by nature. A thriller with a sense of justice, and a more literary bent than, say, your average Grisham. I’ll pause here to say that there was a time in […]

Tennis, Anyone?

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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I played a lot of sports in middle school and high school and somehow, I had never touched a tennis racket until about two years ago.  I promptly put that racket back after that first outing, because I was absolutely terrible.  I have read a lot of TJR’s books and really loved The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, I like Daisy Jones and the Six, and I enjoyed the rest of her oeuvre enough to read them on the beach. So it shouldn’t have been […]

OK, I Need to Talk About These Books

Crush by Eve Newton

Destroy by Eve Newton

Reclaim by Eve Newton

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NOTE:  This review will contain spoilers for the overall series – stop reading now if you want to remain unspoiled.  Thumbnail: I won’t tell you to read or not to read these, but take the author’s note/trigger warnings seriously.  If you read them, and worry that something is going to trigger you – it will.  There are no holds barred in these novels, and there is a high level of violence.  Sexual assault is depicted on multiple occasions. Well.  I read all three of these […]

“Don’t worry about any of this stuff, okay? It’s all just adult junk that doesn’t mean anything.”

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki, Jillian Tamaki

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This One Summer is a re-read for me. It is also the book I have read in the past few years specifically from the Banned Book List put out by the ALA that makes me scratch my head the most. It is because this is the book that hit #1 most challenged in 2016 and was why I read it in 2017. It then came back to the top ten in 2018. It did not make sense to me then, and it makes little sense […]

A little pride and culture

Marley's Pride by Joelle Retener

Our World: Ireland. by Muireann Ni Chiobhain

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I call myself a “book pusher,” but I am not at the top of this book train. I have my own pusher, Maya at Barefoot Books. And they have Barefoot behind them. And behind this publisher are the wonderful authors that put our wonderful books. And in April 2024 two very different, but equally awesome books will be out. And I get to push them on you… I mean introduce you to them. And you will be so happy for this introduction you will push […]

Bronze Age Crete in modern tone

Minoan Wings V02 Swallow's Dance by Wendy Orr

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A companion to Minoan Wings V01 Dragonfly Song we follow a young woman on the eve of her first “bleeding” (mensuration) and what that means to her within her community in Minoan Wings V02 Swallow’s Dance. Several natural disasters mean that our narrators’ carefully ordered and privileged life is shattered. Eventually, these disasters leave her, her mother and their old nursemaid-slave homeless and alone in a strange new land. Realizing how her once higher status is now her greatest enemy, she must learn to put […]



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