Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A porn star and a virgin walk into a bakery

Make You Mine (Running in Circles #1) by E.M. Lindsey

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CBR15Bingo: Edibles square CBR15Passport: New to me author Noah is a reluctant baker trying to keep his deceased bubbe’s beloved family bakery afloat. After leaving school to be the sole guardian and provider for his fourteen-year-old brother Adam, Noah believes he cannot survive losing another family member. As a young child, he and his family left Tel Aviv after the death of his father. Devastated, his mother never recovered and met her own tragic end. After losing his grandmother, twenty-year-old Noah makes a promise to […]

Science fiction + philosophy = a curiously French novel

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

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CBR15 BINGO – Take Flight, because a flight from Paris to New York figures critically in the plot of the novel On March 10, an Air France flight leaves Paris for JFK Airport in New York City. Among the 200+ passengers and crew aboard flight 006 are a young attorney, a closeted Nigerian pop star, a hitman leading a double life, a French novelist, a young film editor and her much older romantic partner, and a seven-year-old girl. The plane encounters turbulence so fierce that […]

An earlier novel by a favorite author

The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

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CBR15 BINGO – Relation”Ship”, for the relationships between four high school friends and their families, both known and unknown I suspect I’m like most readers in that I first encountered Emily St. John Mandel when I read her brilliant and heart-aching Station Eleven. Since then, I’ve eagerly awaited her new novels and, having caught up on those, I finally turned to her earlier works. The Lola Quartet, published two years before Station Eleven, is the story of a group of high school friends in Florida who […]

WHAT in the VICTIM-BLAMEY BULLSHIT

A Soul to Keep by Opal Reyne

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WHAT in the VICTIM-BLAMEY BULLSHIT did I JUST READ??? Okay, listen, I’m on board with the consensual monster-fucking. No question. I will read ten bajillion versions of the same basic Beauty & the Beast plot where we literally or metaphorically marry the creepy creature, and then discover that that there is actually a soulmate. Great! Gets me every time! I am even fully down for the variations where the monster love interest has totally non-human anatomy – it requires authorial creativity that I enjoy, and […]

Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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“He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.” ― Sally Rooney, Normal People CBR15Bingo: Adulthood CBR15Passport: Books from different countries Connell and Marianne grow up together in the same small town in Ireland. Connell is the nerd and jock who hangs out with the wealthier, more popular kids. […]

The Question of Soulmates

Wolfsong by T.J. Klune

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The thing about Wolfsong is that it’s a keen example of the best thing about paranormal romance as a genre: it’s a way to explore a deep corner of human nature by coming at it sideways, through a fantasy concept that magnifies the details. This one, in particular, is about what it might mean to have a soulmate. People give this book some flak for the age gap – and I see that, and it didn’t need to be quite this wide, but I can […]



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