Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

CBR15 Bingo: Relation”ship”

It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey

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CBR15 Bingo: Relation”ship” (A book about sisterly love, romantic love and featuring large fishing boats) Apparently, our heroine, Piper Bellinger, is strongly inspired by Alexis Rose in Schitt’s Creek, Tessa Bailey wanted her to have her own happy ending. First of all, I’m not really sure I think Alexis was too badly off at the end of the show, just because she wasn’t shacked up with a man. Her ending seemed perfectly happy to me – not all HEAs need to involve a romantic partner. […]

Roll Call of the Anonymous Dead

Lay Them to Rest by Laurah Norton

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CBR 15 Bingo – On the Road: Laurah and Amy spend much of the book on various road trips around the United States chasing down leads on the identity of “Ina” Jane Doe. True crime podcast host Laurah and forensic anthropologist Dr. Amy work to uncover the identity of the Ina County Jane Doe, who has been unidentified since her partial remains were found in 1993. Though I enjoy the true crime genre, I generally avoid stories which don’t have conclusive endings – I’ve always found […]

A complex story about race, class, family and history

The Wedding: A Novel by Dorothy West

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Cbr15bingo politics, racial politics in particular On a summer day on Martha’s Vineyard some time in 1950s America, beautiful Shelby Cole is getting ready to marry the man she loves, and in the 24 hours leading up to the wedding, the reader of Dorothy West’s 1995 novel The Wedding becomes privy to the complicated class and racial politics that swirl around what should be a happy day. West, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, captures generations’ worth of “striving to succeed while black in […]

Second Verse, Same as the First 56

Payback in Death by J. D. Robb

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Payback in Death is J. D. Robb’s 57th installment in her bestselling In Death series, and it shows. That is a lot of time to spend with character development and world building. This book is filled with the nods to earlier cases, supporting characters, and events both everyday and momentous that die hard fans keep going back. At this point, Lt. Eve Dallas of the New York Police and Security Department has been married to the charming former thief turned billionaire, Roarke for three years. […]

The Truth Machine

The Truth Machine by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna

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The Truth Machine is an unapologetically pro-crypto book. I read it because I’m not a pro-crypto person and I wanted to see what a fawning take on the technology could do to sway my opinion. I am largely unswayed, though cases in which this book covers real world applications of crypto were interesting. To that end, it opens by describing a refugee crisis in Jordan. As an experiment, the UN decided to use blockchain technology to track how refugees were accessing their food allotments. This […]

Terrifying Faith

The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor

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Frances Marion Tarwater, 14, has been raised by his great-uncle Mason. Frances was “born from a wreck” as his mother was injured in a car crash and lived just long enough to deliver her son. Originally, the boy was sent to live with his uncle Rayber, a schoolteacher. But Mason, a religious fanatic who lives out in the woods and sells homemade hooch, kidnaps the baby so he can raise him to be a prophet like himself. As the novel begins, Mason dies, leaving young […]



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