Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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The Sorry State of the Modern Malaise Novel

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee

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The more I read of a particular genre of modern literature, the more it feels the same. The genre is a relative recent one, looking at well-off white people experiencing a midlife change, usually precipitated by crisis. There’s a familiar pattern to the plots which goes beyond typical story beats and almost down to the sentence level. There’s almost a “find & replace” element to them. A few manage to rise above this but most are middling, not bad but not lyrically rich. A Thousand […]

Exciting historical fiction for the kids

The Bletchley Riddle by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin

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The Bletchley Riddle, a novel for readers age 10-14, was co-written by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin. The two authors take turns writing chapters from the points of view of 14-year-old Lizzie (Sepetys) and her 19-year-old brother Jakob (Sheinkin). It’s a fast-paced, thrilling and educational mystery/spy novel set in the early days of WWII at Great Britain’s top secret location for code breaking — Bletchley Park. Sepetys and Sheinkin include tons of fascinating historical facts and real historical figures in their story. When the story […]

What if Cinderella was a handsome Jewish man and the prince was a determined and beautiful heiress?

Marry Me by Midnight by Felicia Grossman

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Isabelle Lira wants to take charge of her deceased father’s business, but is hindered from doing so both because she is a woman and because the Jewish community she lives in finds it unacceptable. So she must find a husband who will not object to her controlling her family’s interests, and who won’t be cruel, abusive or who will take advantage of her and her wealth. In order to find a suitable match, she is arranging three festival events, where all eligible Jewish men are […]

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: A Novel by Stephen Graham Jones

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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a wild and bloody novel, and I’ve never read anything quite like it. Stephen Graham Jones takes the vampire story into new territory – late 19th and early 20th century Montana, the Western frontier where whites are violently encroaching and native peoples find their communities and their environment subject to horrendous brutality and destruction. What better or more appropriate way to tell American History than through a horror story. The novel begins in contemporary Wyoming where 42-year-old Communications and Journalism […]

Everybody’s Talking at Me

Babel by R F Kuang

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  Britain has a problem. It’s struggling to find its place in a shifting world order which is made even more difficult by its inability to have any real societal discussions on its imperial legacy. Our schools and entire educational system were built to churn out good colonial administrators, able to manage an empire but not think about the suffering of the peoples enslaved by it. It also has a rich folkloric history, one of magic and the supernatural. R. F. Kuang’s Babel brings those […]

I’m not tough enough for the Canadian oil sands

Ducks by Kate Beaton

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I first became aware of Kate Beaton through her charming picture book, The Princess and the Pony, released in 2015.  My, at the time, young daughters loved the book about a tiny, warrior princess who wants a noble steed like the older warriors.  Instead on her birthday she is gifted a pony that farts too much. Shortly after the publication of her graphic novel autobiography, Ducks, in 2022, it seemed everyone on the internet was declaring what a good book it was.  However, I wasn’t really […]



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