Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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World Cold and Hard, Legends & Lattes Soft and Warm

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

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There’s something delightful about a story with low stakes. So often stories set in fantasy worlds have so much at stake that the quiet moments can be lost, the fates of the kingdom or the world taking over. Legends & Lattes is all about the quiet moments, of the therapeutic joy of brewing a cup of coffee. It’s also about the joy of making something with people you care about, and dare I say it, of chosen family. Not that the last part is super […]

Transition Can Save Your Life, But It Won’t Fix It By Itself

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

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Nevada found me at an interesting point in my life. I find myself at a midpoint between the two protagonists, Maria and James, looking forwards and back at them and wondering how I relate to them and how they would relate to me. Maria is a trans woman, living in New York and finding herself without direction. Transition has made her the woman she is today, but on the heels of a breakup with her longterm girlfriend, she’s not really sure who that is anymore. […]

A sip of cozy

Small Hours: A Mrs. Frollein Collection by Valerie Minelli

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cbr14bingo Cozy Level 2 Mrs. Frollein is a woman who has a few bad days, a few good days, and days where she shows her husband(?) her “full moon” as a (adorable) joke. Because she is adorable (even when she toots), she eats, sleeps, deals with every day and beside her is her partner. Small Hours: A Mrs. Frollein Collection collected several of the webcomics and broke them down into the four seasons of the year. There was also (at the time) several never seen […]

Komi is Learning but What about Everyone Else?

Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 11 by Tomohito Oda

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My kind of mindless yet entertaining read has recently been the Komi Can’t Communicate manga. The interesting thing is that until now, this series told as a bunch of loosely connected mini-episodes has so far managed to stay interesting. It took until volume eleven for things to get a little shaky. I still like Komi, and she’s making steady progress as a character. She actually speaks a few complete sentences to different people here, out loud. The romance angle is obvious and a little pointless […]

“On her First Holy Communion, Majella could remember sitting in the chapel for a long time, with Jesus stuck to the roof of her mouth, and her trying to peel him off with her tongue. Somehow she knew picking him off with her finger was all wrong.”

Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

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Majella is the queen of coping; she has developed a system of avoiding eye contact, she gladly relies on years-long joke exchanges orchestrated by her customers and coworkers, and she is clear about people explaining idioms and small-town customs to her as a needed relief. She is also coping with the world around her; her uncle “died for the cause”, her IRA-adjacent father disappeared years ago, her mother is lost in a haze of whiskey, and her beloved grandmother has recently been beaten to death. […]

Life is a long quiet river…

La brocante Nakano (The Nakano Thrift Shop) by Hiromi Kawakami (translated by Elisabeth Suetsugu)

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This is the second book by Hiromi Kawakami I have read and even though I don’t remember many details about the first one, it apparently was enjoyable enough that I bought three other books by her… I hope the other two are more to my liking because this one was a struggle. I enjoyed the writing. The story was very slow but that doesn’t bother me as a rule. I just found every single character to be extremely uninteresting. Even the not particularly nice ones. […]



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