Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Families are like fingerprints; no two are the same, and they tend to leave their mark.”

Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney

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CBR 15 Bing0 – Politics This is my first Alice Feeney and it is a good book for spoooooky season. Feeney does her own spin on an Agatha Christie-style “And Then There Were None” story, in that she sort of cribbed from it entirely in a number of key ways. Britain? Check. Isolated group on an island? Check. Creepy rhymes (in this case, poems)? Check. People starting dying one by one? Check. That said, her take on the construct was refreshing and kept me turning […]

Toni Morrison (1)

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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I was just reading Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar, and she discusses Beloved briefly as a Madea story. This is true in the sense that the plot of Beloved involves Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman now ten or more years after the Civil War, living in a house in Ohio that is haunted by some sort of presence. Sethe too is a quite haunted woman. In a moment of abject fear and panic, some years earlier Sethe kills her infant daughter when she believes that she’s […]

“We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

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I’ve had The Dutch House (2019) by Ann Patchett sitting on my hold list at the library for literal ages. It’s been available numerous times, but I kept postponing it because there was always something more pressing or exciting to read. Finally, I saw it again when I was looking for audiobooks to read and a familiar name caught my eye. Tom Hanks was the narrator of the audiobook! I usually like to read my literature myself, but I’m also a fan of Tom Hanks, so I […]

It’s pretty obvious from the get go that Eleanor Oliphant is far from completely fine

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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CBR15 Bingo: Europe – The book is set in Glasgow, Scotland. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is not a book I would have chosen for myself but it was selected by my book club.  This has been a reoccurring theme since I joined.  I’m glad to be gently pushed out of my comfort zone of almost exclusively reading fantasy, sci-fi, and romance.  It is highly recommended by several Cannonballers so I was excited to start reading.  However, not long after starting I began to question […]

“Love was the destroyer. It made mourners, widows, left misery in its wake. Grief and love were one and the same. Grief was the shadow love left when it was gone.”

Rules of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo

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CBR Bingo – Take Flight This is the final book both in the King of Scars duology, and in Bardugo’s entire Grishaverse, and it wraps everything up very satisfyingly. We were reunited with some favorite characters from across her universe, good triumphed over evil, and love melted even the most grief-stricken and cold hearts. (Sidenote: I’ve chosen this book for the”take flight” bingo category because aerial warfare has a huge role in this world, not to mention two characters who develop the skill of flight […]

Lock your doors, turn up the lights, surround yourself with garlic, and never invite a stranger in!

Frights from Feral V01 Welcome to Feral by Mark Fearing

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Mark Fearing (if that is their real name and not their ghost writer name) must have been one strange child and now a stranger adult. A child that was haunted by the best of the best hauntings, ghosts and ghouls whom they made friends with and shared with us now. They introduce us to those friends in their series about the town of Feral. Freya is our detective of the odd things in this town called Feral. They know the truth (or so they think) […]



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