Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Spot on

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon

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I was pleasantly surprised re-reading this book, fully expecting it to go to the resale pile as I remembered very little about it other than that it was a mystery about a dead dog solved by a teenager with autism. I was even less enthusiastic after reading House Rules (see previous review), which very much read like a book by someone who was trying very very hard to understand autism rather than someone who actually did. That’s the difference between the books though, Haddon reaches […]

I bet that golden ticket makes the chocolate taste terrible

Switched On by John Elder Robison

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The elevator pitch for this book is “Awakenings for Autism,” but it’s obviously more than that. John Robison is pretty up front about – well, everything because of that aforementioned Autism, but more importantly – becoming the voice of high functioning Autism (previously Asperger’s) by virtue of having written a memoir and without any scientific background in neuroscience. Which isn’t entirely fair, because Look Me In the Eye is an exceptionally well crafted memoir that gives the reader a sense of how Robison thinks, not […]

Sometimes your mom does know best

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

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The Bride Test is the second romance from Helen Hoang. I had to figure out what all the buzz was about for myself and was not disappointed. I absolutely love the illustrated cover. Definitely don’t want this trend to go away. I haven’t gotten around to her previous book, The Kiss Quotient, but thankfully, this series can be read as stand-alone books. The characters simply inhabit the same universe. After a tragic loss, Khai Diep believes he can’t feel emotion because his grief didn’t follow […]

Sugary sweet summer read

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

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Bingo Square: Listicle When I saw the Listicle category, I figured the easiest way to find a list with something I wanted to read would be to google “Best Books of 2019” or “Summer Reads for 2019,” and Cosmopolitan came through for me.  It had a few novels I had already read and enjoyed, a few that were already on my to read list, and has given me a few more novels to keep an eye out for.  The Bride Test fell into the second […]

An excellent follow-up to a successful debut

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

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From Goodreads: Khai Diep has no feelings. Well, he feels irritation when people move his things or contentment when ledgers balance down to the penny, but not big, important emotions—like grief. And love. He thinks he’s defective. His family knows better—that his autism means he just processes emotions differently. When he steadfastly avoids relationships, his mother takes matters into her own hands and returns to Vietnam to find him the perfect bride. As a mixed-race girl living in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City, […]

The Convenience of Individuality

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

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This is one of those strange little books that I found reaffirmed my belief in the idea of being true to yourself. There are a lot of platitudes about that concept, mostly Disney-fied or Rom-Comish in execution, and those platitudes always ring hollow to me. They seem sacharine, or manipulative, or frustratingly narrow in execution. What Sayaka Murata offers in Convenience Store Woman is a character so out of synch with the rest of her society, but so in synch with the world of her […]



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