Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Book people are the best people!

The Door-To-Door Bookstore: A Novel by Carsten Henn

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This charming novel was a local bookstore’s pick for its monthly book club. The bookstore, which I have mentioned in previous reviews, is the Cincinnati Book Bus, which is a non-profit bookstore. They raise money to get books into schools and young readers’ hands, and during the summer months, they have a book bus that takes its wares on the road. The Door-To-Door Bookstore is a perfect choice for their book club, as it is a German novel (translation by Melody Shaw) about an old […]

“This modern love breaks me”

Blue Sisters (2024) by Coco Mellors

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Blue Sisters is about four sisters–except Nicky, the youngest, is dead, and Avery (the eldest organised lawyer one), Lucky (the beautiful model and self-destructive drug-addled party girl), and Bonnie (the sporty one), are flailing, a year on. There is some nuance here–Avery is a former heroin addict about to blow her perfect marriage and house in Hampstead Heath apart; Lucky plays guitar. Bonnie, most intriguingly, is a boxer, and Mellors’s descriptions of her physicality are some of the best passages in the novel: Your knuckles, […]

A Week for Pop Culture Exploration of Fascist Themes

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

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My library reservation for Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, the lastest book in her Hunger Games collection, finally came in two days after I finished watching the remarkable second season of Andor. I have really enjoyed and thought about Collins’ novels over the years, so I knew what I was getting into, but that was a weighty few days of pop culture consumption. Sunrise on the Reaping takes the reader back to the 50th Hunger Games, the Quarter Quell we first heard about in […]

I’ve got mixed feelings about this one

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel by Bonnie Garmus

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Lessons in Chemistry is a novel of extremes. It details horrible loss and heartbreak, but it also delivers moments of humor. Its main female character suffers misogyny, abuse, and  debasement, but she also finds the courage to fight back tirelessly and valiantly not just for herself but for others. It’s generally an enjoyable read, but my overall impression is that it was rather fantastical. Despite every bad thing in the world happening, somehow our unlikely downtrodden protagonist perseveres. Nothing wrong with that, but given that […]

“And he’ll burn our horizons / make no mistakes”

The Song of Achilles (2011) by Madeline Miller

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Spoiler alerts for a Bronze Age epic poem, I guess, also content note for discussion of sex in this review. I liked this but I didn’t love it. Homer’s Iliad is about blood and fire and gods and fate, about a war that made heroes and villains into legends that echoed through the ages (and sometimes switched their positions). The Song of Achilles is about one of these heroes, the titular Achilles, he of the heel, and his lover Patroclus, and it’s…sweet? And (rather surprisingly) […]

A Flavia de Luce word jumble: puppets, weed, a 1950s pregnancy test, and pigeon droppings that save lives

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

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Years ago, when I was going through a reading drought because life was getting in the way, I desperately needed an escape and Alan Bradley’s first Flavia de Luce mystery nudged a little bit of lightness back into my life (I even wrote a review, which is quite out of character for me). Our recent CBR chat about mysteries reminded me how much I enjoyed sinking into Flavia’s wanderings about Bishop’s Lacey, the rural English town she lives in, so I decided it was time […]



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