Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Game is Afoot

All Dressed Up by Jilly Gagnon

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In an effort to shore up their faltering marriage, Becca and Blake go away for the weekend to a 1920s-themed murder mystery hotel. But when the actress playing the maid disappears, Becca suspects that a real crime might have occurred. I’ve always thought murder mystery dinners would be fun. I’ve never been to one, but I like stories and I like puzzles, and besides nothing that inspired the Edgar Allen Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party could be dull. I was intrigued by the idea of […]

Yet here she was. On vacation. Like an idiot.

Said No One Ever by Stephanie Eding

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Stephanie Eding’s Said No One Ever didn’t quite work for me. There were parts of it that were charming and fun but as a whole it didn’t come together. Ellie arrives at her airbnb in the middle of nowhere Montana as her hostess, Marilyn, is being carted off in an ambulance. Ellie doesn’t know what happened or how she’s supposed to take care of these farm animals. She’s not supposed to be figuring out how to take care of sheep, donkeys and chickens, she is […]

This will be one of my year-end favorites

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith, Boulet

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Bea Wolf is a graphic novel that re-imagines the classic epic poem Beowulf. I’ve reviewed Seamus Heaney’s award-winning translation of Beowulf as well as  Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife (an excellent read) but this Beowulf is a little different. And it is also outstanding! Bea Wolf is Beowulf for kids. It is clever and hilarious with incredibly good black and white drawings by Boulet. Much like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, kids could read this and get a good laugh out of it, […]

Jane Austen (2)

Persuasion by Jane Austen

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Another student review review. Here of Persuasion, which I have read now five times in the last year. So I asked them to write a capsule review, a haiku or a limerick about it:   Lovely book with lots of marriage and relationships that people are either really excited about or not because of the money and land they possess.   There once was a girl named Anne Third favorite of three in her fam She almost got married, But her dad got her harried […]

J. G. Farrell (1)

Troubles by J.G. Farrell

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“In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles.” This 1970 novel won the “Lost” Booker prize where books from that year were ineligible for rules reasons. And so this won against Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay at Noon, Nina Bawden’s The Birds on the Trees, Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, and Patrick White’s The Vivisector, a tough crowd to win […]

Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

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The last book I reviewed for this site was Janice Hallett’s The Appeal, in which most of the characters were involved with an amateur production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Though it was clearly tangential to the plot and unnecessary to parse the mystery, I was still a tad embarrassed to be unfamiliar with the play. So I decided to rectify that. Miller’s play tells the story of two families, the Kellers and the Deevers, who used to be next-door neighbors. The fathers were […]



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