Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This will be one of my year-end favorites

Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith, Boulet

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Bea Wolf is a graphic novel that re-imagines the classic epic poem Beowulf. I’ve reviewed Seamus Heaney’s award-winning translation of Beowulf as well as  Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife (an excellent read) but this Beowulf is a little different. And it is also outstanding! Bea Wolf is Beowulf for kids. It is clever and hilarious with incredibly good black and white drawings by Boulet. Much like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, kids could read this and get a good laugh out of it, […]

A bit of a mixed bag (and a complete Passport!)

The Lost Apothecary: A Novel by Sarah Penner

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CBR15passport book you own (passport complete) I bought this book a while back as part of a sale. It’s historical fiction, which I almost always enjoy, and it moves back and forth between the late 18th century and present day London. Overall, it’s a decent read, the kind of book that you could finish on a long flight or over a weekend. Its focus is on female characters struggling to deal with dishonest and unfaithful men, and women finding fulfillment in their own work and […]

This ain’t Green Acres

In the Beginning Was the Sea by Tomas Gonzalez

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Cbr15passport books from different countries (Colombia) I learned about this short novel from a NYT “By the Book” interview with Patricia Engel. When asked about a great book that no one seems to know about, she mentioned Tomas Gonzalez’s In the Beginning Was the Sea (published in 1983, English translation in 2014 by Frank Wynne) for its shocking twists and turns. I must admit, it did not disappoint. The set up of the novel had the potential for it to be a comedy, but this […]

“How terrible – to be an ordinary orphan.”

When We Were Sisters: A Novel by Fatimah Asghar

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CBR15passport new to you authors Fatimah Asghar (they/them) is a writer and co-producer of the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+ as well as creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls. They have published poetry and a previous novel, If They Come For Us. Asghar’s parents experienced the chaos and violence of the partition of India and Pakistan and emigrated to the US, where Asghar was born.  Asghar’s parents died when Asghar was a child. While similar events occur in When We Were Sisters, this […]

Big Finish!

The Toll: Arc of a Scythe Book 3 by Neal Shusterman

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This series is outstanding. This final book hit all the right notes and brought its several storylines together in a coherent, exciting and generally satisfying way. My review of Thunderhead indicated that there was a biblical tone to that book, and that tone is even more obvious in The Toll. But this is not a series about religion so much as about human nature, politics and belief. The Toll brings together four storylines. There is the story of Scythe Faraday and his search for the […]

I’m dying. I’m dead. Murdered by the puppy cannon!

The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan

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CBR15passport recommended ‘You can address me by my preferred title: you idiot.’ I’ve seen references to “the puppy cannon” amongst romance novel fans here on CBR over the years. I never really investigated what it meant and in my head, for some reason, it was “the puppy canon,” like some kind of reference to a specific sub-genre of romance novel. It is not. It is truly the puppy cannon, and if there were to be some kind of puppy cannon canon, I would be all […]



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