Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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These characters have SO much in common, but their crippling insecurities may be the worst thing they share

While You Were Seething by Charlotte Stein

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3.5 stars Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. This book will be out on April 9th. Daisy Emmett is an excellent PR manager and has successfully managed a number of difficult clients, but trying to repair the image of famous romance author Caleb Miller, after he very publicly declared to the world that “happy endings are for fools”, might be her most difficult job yet. Their mutual dislike of one another started when they were […]

I can’t stop thinking about my lost pizza.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives (The Kamogawa Food Detectives, #1) by Hisashi Kashiwai

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I maintain that this premise is amazing, and it needs to exist in real life. The idea of food I will never taste again HAUNTS ME. I am not even being dramatic, I am being so real with you right now. (My #1 pick for this would be Pizza D’Amore’s piping hot square pizza slices, in the Paradise Valley Mall. AND I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE.) I will also admit that the premise hit me so strongly that I gave this book more stars than […]

This standalone fantasy goes incredibly hard.

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao

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Sending up the Bat Signal on this book, my first use of it this year. (FYI the last time I used it was with The Raven Scholar, my best book of 2025, so you know it’s serious.) I wouldn’t recommend this book as widely or as often as I have The Raven Scholar, but for a certain type of reader, this thing will hit hard. (As it hit me. Last night, crying softly on my couch as I opined to myself, IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL.) First […]

The first T. Kingfisher book is one of my new faves!

Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher

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“All you had were pigs and enthusiasm. It’s not your fault.” The first book Ursula Vernon wrote under the penname T. Kingfisher; she self-published it because trad publishing did not want to subject children to things they felt were “inappropriate.” Meanwhile, she’s over here in her introduction to the new, adorable trad-published version of this book, saying things like, kids would appreciate a dead body or two. And I agree with her! Anyway, this book is in the tradition of Pratchett, with T. Kingfisher proclivities […]

A perfectly fine book, just not for me.

Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson

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Honestly, this is a good book, and I knew when I bought it that things might turn out this way, but I wanted to give it a shot. This is a vampire story, and above all, a story of revenge. I enjoy a good revenge story now and then, but this is the type I do not care for: one that takes its characters to places they cannot come back from. Also, depressing. Specifically: SPOILERS their journey of vengeances leads our two main characters, an […]

“What else is life but a string of outcomes beyond our control?”

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vols. 1-3 by Beth Brower

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This is a wild thing to say, but I’m saying it, so stay with me. This series is Dungeon Crawler Carl for the Jane Austenites. I’m not even finished with it yet and I already know that. It’s the kind of story you read once, probably in a very short time, then immediately go back in for a re-read or five. This story is—aside from having lovable characters and a certain anti-authoritarian bent—nothing like Dungeon Crawler Carl. And yet. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. […]



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