Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Generational trauma, made worse through institutional systems

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

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Bingo Square: Map (the father is a map maker) This book made me cry twice, I loved the way it tied back to history, and also how it explored the Great Hunger, showing the impact on families and the land. It also showed hints of the many complex themes throughout Irish history, some in conflict and some in conversation with each other, from the role of the old ways and the Catholic Church, class issues, colonization and the relationship with the English. There’s this large focus […]

Shenanigans for Grown-Ups

The Break by Marian Keyes

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Every bubble in the galaxy has burst. The million shards of sparkle suspended in the air have turned to wet ash. All the colour has leached away and the world is just grey, grey, grey.  Amy O’Connell is a 44 year old mother of three daughters, married to Hugh. She loves him, but life is a dull and chaotic blur and while she realises that Hugh is struggling after the death of his father, she is blindsided when he tells her he wants to take […]

That is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.

Foster by Claire Keegan

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My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me. ― Claire Keegan, Foster And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end, but each day follows on much like the one before. ― Claire Keegan, Foster In Foster, a young girl is sent to […]

Not That Kind of Oven

Skye O'Malley by Bertrice Small

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Beautiful Skye O’Malley falls in love with Niall Burke on the eve of her marriage to another man, but even someone as adventurous as she cannot imagine the twists and turns her life will take on her way back to him. Sometimes you just want to lay back, turn off your brain, and enjoy a rollicking adventure full of romance, drama, and a surprising amount of politics. Bertrice Small’s work fits the bill perfectly, and in the life of Skye O’Malley, her best known heroine, […]

And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror? ― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These “What it is to be a man,” she said, […]

And now there’s a ghost cat, as if a dead body wasn’t enough.

Something Whiskered (A Cat in the Stacks Mystery #17) by Miranda James

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Charlie Harris is a mid-fifties librarian in a small college in Athens, Mississippi, who shares his house with a cast of characters, and two cats; Ramses, an orange tabby, and Diesel, a 35 lb. Maine Coon the size of apparently a Beagle (why this cat is not in the Guinness Book of Records, I don’t know). Charlie, being a proper Southern Gentleman, and a nosy coot who believes he can do a better job than the police, decides he needs to get involved in every […]



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