Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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As the author says, it is Norman Rockwell with more Tupperware.

Home for Christmas by Susan Branch

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At first, I was not really into Home for Christmas by Susan Branch. I was wondering, “Where is Jim-Bob and John-Boy?” The cute hand-written text, the mix of illustrations and black and white photographs left nothing to the imagination. You knew the emotions the author wanted and where they were taking you. But then I was, “That’s not so bad. I mean it is nice not to have anything really bad happen. They are growing up poor, but they do not care/really know it, as […]

They sure did smoke all the time back in the day, didn’t they? (double bingo)

Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart

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CBR14 Bingo: Question (the book’s title is a question and there is a central murder mystery where the identity of the murderer is in question) Young widow Charity Selborne is on holiday in the south of France with her friend Louise and they really have little planned except to enjoy the good food, nice drinks, beautiful scenery, and long drives. In Avignon, Charity befriends a young English boy who is also staying at the hotel, offering to take him with her on tours of the […]

August 2022 Leftovers

Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy

Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself by K.C. Constantine

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees by Bob Klapisch and Pete Solotaroff

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

Finley Ball: How Two Outsiders Turned the Oakland As into a Dynasty and Changed Baseball Forever by Nancy Finley

Sea Change by Robert B. Parker

The Hunting Wives by May Cobb

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

Ms. Tree, Volume 1 by Max Alan Collins

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Some extra books I read in August. What a miserably hot month… Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood**** Less a conventional biopic on The Mick and more a look at his life vis-a-vis his legend and the backdrop of postwar America. Not as thorough as I would’ve liked but still riveting given how Jane Leavy presents her subject.   Greenwich Park*** Again glad I slept on my review. I really liked how this started but after a while, it morphed into […]

“My ladies had changed nothing but the reasons for their pretense. If I had learned anything from them, it was this: only a fool lives in water and remains an enemy of the crocodile.”

The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi

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Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Shadow Y’all. I finished this book May 17th for my library book club, and I am just now (finally) reviewing it. What. A. Journey. Big props to CBR Bingo for being the catalyst for me getting me out of this backlog and writing slump… The titular Henna Artist (Lakshmi) is a shadow in that she disappeared from her village and has been building a name for herself in the upper social circles of Jaipur as a henna artist. Her past catches […]

Growing up is hard to do

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

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3.5 stars Official book description: Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father–despite his hard-won citizenship–Lily and Kath risk everything to […]

“If she closed her eyes she might fix this in her memory always: the pulse in Kath’s throat; the warmth of her body; the scent of her skin.”

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

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In Last Night at the Telegraph Club Malinda Lo created National Book Award for Young People’s Literature winner which aims to challenge pervasive perceptions of the 1950s in the United States, including stereotypes about Chinese Americans, the invisibility of the lesbian and gay community, and the role of women in the space program, and the reach of Red Scare paranoia on people’s day to day lives. It is also the story of two young women falling in love during their senior year of high school […]



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