Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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This Book Has a Sweet Tooth, Don’t Read While Hungry

The Professor Next Door by Jackie Lau

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I received an ARC of this book from the author in exchange for a fair and honest review. The Professor Next Door publishes June 8, 2021. Jackie Lau’s next book in her Cider Bar Sisters series is The Professor Next Door and it tells the story of Nicole Louie-Edwards and David Cho, the titular professor next door. A decade after getting out of a rough relationship Nicole has herself settled into her career and life with friends and family, building a life around the version […]

hide all you want, but nothing stays buried

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

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Jeanie and Julius have spent their entire lives together. Over half a century of life together has passed, and they have never spent an entire night separate from each other. Jeanie tends the garden with their mother, Dot, and Julius works odd jobs in the village. Jeanie, Julius, and Dot depend fiercely on one another. They accept nothing from the outside world- at least, Jeanie and Julius spent the last 51 years believing that they were accepting nothing and indebted to no one but each […]

True crime and queer history.

Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green

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Thanks to Celadon Books for the ARC! It has not affected the content of my review. I wish I had gotten to this book before publication, but better late than never. I was offered an ARC and accepted gladly, as I’d wanted to read the book anyway. It then arrived weeks late, presumably because the USPS is having some capital ‘I’ Issues right now. The book was worth the wait, though, even if I was sort of unsettled and left a bit unsatisfied at the […]

if it feels too good to be true…

The Whispering House by Elizabeth Brooks

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THEN IT IS! RUN! Freya, our protagonist, is a willfully clueless horror heroine. Were The Whispering House a movie, we would all be shouting at her every time she was on screen. Don’t open that door! Don’t drink that tea! Don’t go up those stairs! Don’t look behind you! Don’t move in to the crumbling manor house that is somehow connected to your sister’s suicide days after meeting the charming yet off-putting man of the house! Just…DON’T! A blurb on the cover of my ARC states […]

“Everything that happened next was only possible because my mother was absent. It wasn’t that she left the house much, it was that a part of her had abandoned her body and now resisted coming back.”

How to Order the Universe by María José Ferrada

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A precocious child, a beat-up Renault, traveling salesmen and the uneasy promise of ghosts populate this tiny but mighty book. M, our narrator, has struck a deal with her father. They haunt the dusty roads of Pinochet’s Chile as a sales-duo, using M’s charms to sway shop owners towards buy more nails, hammers, and other hardware than her father could sell on his own. If the person in charge focused on my pupils, instead of encountering me, he or she encountered every possible form of […]

“She was probably wearing real Chanel Vamp nail polish, not knockoff Revlon Vixen”

Justine by Forsyth Harmon

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Ali is bored, lonely, and smitten. Justine is bold, aloof, and irresistible. The girls meet in a Long Island Stop & Shop in the summer of 1999. I’ve been quoting from this song a lot lately, but as John Darnielle said so perfectly in “Old College Try”: Things will shortly get completely out of hand There is something visceral about peeking back into the mind of a suburban tri-state-area teen. This book stuck with me like the frequently mentioned feeling of bare thighs sticking to […]



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