Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“I could not prevent what was done to me, nor can I change what people made of me. But I know what I am and have decided to continue being what I am.”

Dragon Keeper (The Rain Wild Chronicles, #1) by Robin Hobb

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This is the fourth series overall set in Robin Hobb’s Elderlings world, and the second that takes place in the Rain Wilds, with the liveships and dragons, after The Liveship Traders. I continue to be very, very glad I gave her another chance as an author. I loved revisiting this world and seeing characters from Liveship again, but here we get an all-new set of characters to follow for four books, including a dragon POV! Please do not read further if you haven’t read The […]

I have only just now noticed the snake on the cover of this book. Which is extremely foreboding if you’ve read the book!

Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford

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This one is going to be tough for me to review because I did like the book, and it was very well-written, and the audio narration was well-performed (by the author herself!), but I didn’t feel that sense of resolution I normally feel after finishing a good book. On a conscious level, I wanted things from this book that it didn’t seem interested in providing, so there was always going to be a clash there (more on this below), but also, there’s just something I […]

“You can’t discover what’s true based on how many people think it’s true.”

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

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I’m not going to let this excellent book be the one that let me get behind in reviews in 2022. I’ve been too intimidated to start writing this review because the book was so smart, so I sat down just now and decided I was going to type until a review came out. So that’s what’s happening here. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is just as cheeky as its title would imply. The book is (darkly) funny, and the story of Katharina Kepler […]

“The doom has come upon me.”

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9) by Agatha Christie

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One part of this was uncomfortably dated, but otherwise this was a fun listen. There is somewhat of an epic red herring (I think that’s what we would call it) in this one, and I didn’t see it coming at all. It helps that I really like Emilia Fox as a narrator. The one downside with her is that she flattens out the characters with American accents, but her British characters are superb. An American film star moves into Miss Marple’s neighborhood (in the very […]

This metaphor is a metaphor for my metaphor.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

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This is a really tough one for me to review, and not because of the subject matter. I wasn’t drawn to this one on my own, but picked it up because one of my real life book clubs chose it for January. I did the audio because it was available on SCRIBD, a service I already pay for, and I didn’t have time to do the hard copy with my already packed January TBR. This turned out to be a mistake, I think, though not […]

“She accepted the visit and lived in anticipation, wondering what was to come. It was November 19, 1950. She would be dead in ten days.”

The Broken Girls by Simone St. James

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I’m not going to compare this to The Sun-Down Motel, which is the only other book of hers I’ve read, because they are very different books, which I wasn’t expecting because of their seeming similarities (dual timelines, ghosts, murder). And on its own, I enjoyed listening to this book very much. (Rebecca Lowman does a good job with the narration, although her male performances sometimes slip into silliness.) The two timelines are: Vermont, 1950, at the boarding school of Idlewind, a school for girls who […]



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