Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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This book damn near killed me. And I’m still not quite sure what to say about it. On the surface the plot is simple; two people from different walks of life come together, don’t always communicate great and life ensues. The book is told in alternating chapters from Connell and Marianne’s perspective, jumping in time with each chapter. They meet as teenagers and start having sex and (maybe) falling in love. Connell feels like he is truly himself when Marianne is around. Marianne falls under […]

Justice served with a side of pineapple. That’s what I’m here for.

Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani

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Sunbolt is one of those books that suck you in and you can’t put down. We meet Hitomi as she is on her way to a secret meeting that she hasn’t been invited to. A fortune teller stops her and begs to tell her fortune (which is of course delightfully vague and thrillingly ominous) telling her to run. Soon, sure enough the armed guards of the evil Blackflame are at her heals and she must run to escape them. Not just because she is foreign, […]

A Doctor Who twist on classic fairy tales

Time Lord Fairy Tales by Justin Richards and David Wardle

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Time lord fairy tales, like the title succinctly suggests, is a mashup of the Who-niverse and the good old (Western) fairy tales. It puts classical Doctor Who characters into sometimes well-known fairy tales other times stories that either just borrow the structure of fairy tales or that I don’t know. As an adult it was fun to guess along to identify the origin story or the original baddie. However even though the stories are all written by the same author the quality varies wildly. “Heroes […]

Read it, like a child, into the night

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

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Helen Franklin is an English ex-pat in Prague on a mission to penalize herself for a mysterious past. However she cannot avoid the friendship of Karel and Thea and for a while she is almost happy. Then Melmoth appears. Melmoth is the an old tale of the wanderer, the one who is there to witness when no one else is and what she sees is the depravity, the loss the despair. Melmoth is just a myth, or so it seems until Karel gets a letter […]

“My father was dying and I was pregnant. Both struck me as impossibly unreal.”

Brother, I'm dying by Edwidge Danticat

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Do you like to cry? Do you like to be reminded about sadness, loss and the general unfairness of the world. Then boy! Do I have the book for you. In the very first chapter we follow a daughter as she takes her dying father to the hospital, and then later in the living room at home when he gathers the family turns to his wife and asks “What would you like to happen after I am gone?” So there we are, not just in […]

Fun closed murder-mystery with a lot of men

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

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I am so annoyed at this book. First of all it was way too long. It should have been edited down, not just for length but also several times there was language so floral that it took me completely out of the mystery. I mean stuff like this: “Thankfully, the leaves and twigs are so demoralized by the earlier rain they don’t have the heart to cry out beneath my feet.” Shut up. Just say what you mean. Urh. And every.single.character was a man. And […]



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