Cannonball Read 14

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“I felt sad and a whole lot better at the same time:” Truly a Timeless Classic!

Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary

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I was really going wild at the bookstore over epistolary novels last week and picked up Dear Mr. Henshaw, a book I hadn’t read in a super long time (maybe 20 years?). Happy to say that it holds up and is just as wonderful as I remember! It’s always weird reading a book you read a lot as a kid and seeing it through the eyes of an adult. I was struck by how big the print is, which I didn’t remember at all, and it […]

I love epistolary novels but had a major issue with this one

The Jigsaw Jungle by Kristin Levine

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I am a sucker for an epistolary novel, and this one is told in a combination of notes, transcripts, drawings, and so on to give it a sense that it’s a scrapbook. The Jigsaw Jungle follows Claudia’s quest to figure out why her father has vanished. One evening he sends an email saying he will be home late and then never returns. Claudia’s mother then has to go on a work trip to Switzerland and Claudia ends up staying with her grandfather for two weeks while […]

84, Charing Cross Road for baseball fans

Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger

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Last Days of Summer tells the story of a friendship between Joey Margolis, a Jewish kid growing up in 1940s Brooklyn, and Charlie Banks, a third-baseman for the New York Giants. Joey’s father is completely absent from his life, and it ain’t easy being the Jewish kid at school without a dad (he gets beat up a lot). As a result, Joey acts out, gets himself thrown into juvie for peeing in the reservoir, and embarks on a relentless campaign to get the attention of […]

“Keep Reading. Keep Writing. Keep Fighting. We’re all still here.”

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

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I was intimidated by this book, which feels like a strange thing to say about a book that measures no more than 7 inches tall and less than 200 pages. But I was. A book that inspires so many positive, nay gushing, reviews that also seems to leave the reviewer at a loss for how to describe the book (see please reviews by Aquillia, andtheIToldYouSos, carriejay, and emmalita as a place to start) had me putting it on and taking it off my to read […]

Sorry, guys, this just wasn’t for me

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

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I was excited when I saw this in one of my local little free libraries, because I remembered seeing several very positive reviews on CBR. Sometimes, though, things just don’t work out. On paper, it sounded great: love story between enemies; strong women kicking ass in battle; time travel triggering alternate histories. I wanted to love this. The execution just didn’t work for me. Red and Blue are agents in opposite sides of a war. Red’s side, “the Agency,” is a technotopia, and Blue’s side, […]

You know when it’s not the book’s fault you didn’t like it, you just read it at the wrong time?

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

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I read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as a book club pick during the dead time between Christmas and New Year’s, and resented it the whole time for not being a lightweight romance or cozy mystery. If I had read it in deep February, I might have loved it. On Earth is a novel about inherited childhood trauma written as a letter by the narrator, Little Dog, to his mother, who will never read it. It jumps from events before his birth – the devastating […]



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