Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Botany, Bears and Beaver Ponds

Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey

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This is a lovely, sad, beautifully written book. I feel bad for everyone who rated it one star on Goodreads just because it wasn’t a faithful retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Because if you read it for what it is, instead of what it isn’t, it’s really quite wonderful. Ivey touches on themes of motherhood, love, personal freedom, mental health and the natural world, all in a dark fairy tale setting. Single mom Birdie does the best that she can for her daughter, Emaleen, […]

The Bear Husband

Black Woods Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey

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When The Snow Child came out, I remember being completely blown away by the story – the landscape of Alaska, the characters – everything came together perfectly to create this story. It was such a perfect novel, I am not sure how any author could follow it up. In fact, I am not even entirely sure The Snow Child would still live up to my memory of it if I re-read it now. Overall, I would say this one worked better for me than her […]

Half-Baked Alaska

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

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Thirteen year old Leni doesn’t have the most stable of backgrounds. Her mother, who had her at age fifteen, does the best she can. Her father is a Vietnam vet who spent years in captivity and is drowning his PTSD in alcohol and harebrained get-rich-quick schemes that are invariably abandoned halfway through. It’s the 1970s; the Flower Power movement is in the last of its heyday when Leni’s father receives a letter from the father of a fallen comrade that he’ll give him his son’s […]

February-March 2024 Leftovers

The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones

A Lowcountry Bride by Preslaysa Williams

Bone White by Ronald Malfi

Alexander the Great by Phillip Freeman

Nero: Matricide, Murder and Music in Imperial Rome by Anthony Everitt and Roddy Ashworth

Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James

A Stab in the Dark by Lawrence Block

The Killing Kind by John Connolly

Shōgun by James Clavell

Nobody's Angel by Jack Clark

A Murder in Hollywood: The Untold Story of Tinseltown's Most Shocking Crime by Casey Sherman

Village in the Dark by Iris Yamashita

Nestlings by Nat Cassidy

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland

The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age by Michael Woolraich

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Rain, rain, go away. I thought my reading count looked too low and then I realized I didn’t do leftovers for February, so here’s Feb-March combined. The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and Rise of the Tudors ***** Jones is such a talented historian. Gets all the important stuff of the Wars of the Roses in great detail and lets the story entertain. His Templars book will soon be on my radar. A Lowcountry Bride**** Had to read this for a library […]

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

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After graduating from college, Chris McCandless vanished from his former life and took to the road. The next that his family heard about him was several years later, when he was discovered to have starved to death in the remote Alaskan wilderness. I love Krakauer’s writing, astute and lyrical, and the way he tells this story makes me feel like I’m peering into the abyss of mortality he describes encountering on his ascent of Devils Thumb. Into Thin Air is one of my favorite books […]

Alaska Alas

City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita

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When I looked up books similar to True Detective: Night Country, I couldn’t have known at the time that this would be what I was searching for. Alaska. Remote setting. Layered mystery. Suspicious locals. Detective with a troubled past. Check, check, check and check. This was one where I hurt myself trying to read and absorb as quickly as possible to get to the next page. Not surprising given that Iris Yamashita is a screenwriter. But having had mixed feelings in the past on screenwriters-turned-novelists, Yamashita […]



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