Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ending the year with a cozy fantasy prequel

Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree

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Last Winter Solstice, at our family book exchange, I received Legends and Lattes and adored everything about it!  Fortunately the follow-up book came out in time for my family to get it for me this year.  Bookshops and Bonedust is a prequel to Legends and Lattes and delivers an equally excellent story. When it was announced that Bookshops and Bonedust would be a prequel, I assumed that it would be about when Viv discovers coffee.  I was pleasantly surprised that this is not that book.  In Legends and Lattes, […]

“For whom the wedding bells toll”

Sofia Khan is Not Obliged (2015) by Ayisha Malik

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I wrote a review of Dorothy B. Hughes’s bleak noir novel Ride the Pink Horse (1946) as part of my Bingo this year, and said something about how it implodes comforting myths, and Emmalita commented, which was lovely, about how she came back to romance because sometimes people need escape from noir and need comforting myths (I paraphrase). I chewed this over in my head for a few weeks, and ended up digging out an unread romance novel I bought a while back, Sofia Khan […]

I may have inadvertently started a new holiday tradition

Duke, Actually by Jenny Holiday

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Last December I flew from California to Michigan for my sister’s nursing school graduation.  Shortly after arriving at the airport for my return trip it was announced my flight was delayed.  So I did the only sensible thing and perused the little bookshop for something to read.  I was in the mood for something light and if it was Christmassy, that was a bonus.  I settled on So This is Christmas by Jenny Holiday.  The book was exactly what I was looking for!  Due to […]

Yikes. That didn’t go as planned.

Advika and the Hollywood Wives by Kirthana Ramisetti

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Sometimes you read a book and you’re not sure what went wrong or why you didn’t vibe with it. Other times you know EXACTLY what went wrong and it’s SO FRUSTRATING. Why why why didn’t the author just *not* do what they did, everything would be so good? Why can’t you use your time machine to go back and tell the author how to fix it?? whyyyy. Anyway, this premise remains so tantalizing, which is why I picked up the book. Advika is a twenty-six […]

The Mona-Lisa (Saperstein) of Old New York

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country is a commentary on manners and society in the vein of a Jane Austen novel, and it is a dark, brooding tale of dysfunctional families reminiscent of the Brontes. The main character, Undine Spragg, is a strikingly beautiful young woman from one of the upstart “new” families, desperately trying to break into New York society and make a good marriage to old money. I’ve seen the name Undine Spragg come up quite a lot recently in […]

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

You Exist Too Much (2020) by Zaina Arafat

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“You exist too much”, the narrator’s mother tells her. The narrator’s mother is needy, and manipulative, and homophobic, and devouring; the narrator has grown up censoring and hiding different parts of her self in turn, lying and blending and adapting and code-switching (and part of the brilliance of the book is that it’s sometimes not clear whether this comes out of desire or survival instinct). The narrator is rearranged like a kaleidoscope sometimes by chance and sometimes by circumstance until a relationship crisis forces her […]



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