Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Nerds vs Nazis

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham

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As promised by the title, Graham’s Book and Dagger delivers plenty of stories of academics and librarians helping the Allies in World War II through espionage and other covert ways. As the book notes, the best spy isn’t someone dashing like a James Bond. It’s someone who can’t even get a waiter’s attention. Bring in the nerds! No one can get away with collecting books, or asking questions about train gauges, or fiddling with a dam, quite like a nerd. In my mind, though, the […]

1984 meets Dictatorship meets Spies meets one screwed up world

The Shadower by Peter Hoey and Maria Hoey

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When a book is a real gut punch, I can have a hard time writing a review that does that feeling justice. How do I tell others (in writing therefore, not using facial expressions) how I got a sick feeling in my stomach? How I was shocked, amazed, happy, sad, confused, and had a full understanding of things sometimes all at once? When I started The Shadower by Peter Hoey and Maria Hoey I didn’t think I would have that issue, but by the end […]

“You must remember, family is often born of blood, but it doesn’t depend on blood. Nor is it exclusive of friendship. Family members can be your best friends, you know. And best friends, whether or not they are related to you, can be your family.”

The Mysterious Benedict Society: 10th Anniversary Edition by Trenton Lee Stewart; illustrated by Carson Ellis

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“Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?” So reads an ad in the local newspaper. Dozens of children and are put through a series of increasingly strange and difficult tests, which you the reader get to take along with them. Only four children—two boys and two girls—succeed. Their names and talents? Reynard Muldoon: intelligent, a natural leader, and able to quickly figure out puzzles and word games. George “Sticky” Washington: Also intelligent, with the ability to have anything he reads “stick” in his […]

Backstory Can Be Relevant, Who Knew

Spy X Family vols. 14-15 by Tatsuya Endo

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Turns out that sometimes backstory time can be both interesting and maybe even relevant. Spy x Family is essentially an action-comedy where a spy has to create a family to get close to his mark; the gal he marries is secretly an assassin, the daughter he adopts is secretly a telepath (but she’s 6, meaning she understanding things not the conventional way a lot), and the family dog has some kind of foretelling (but is also a dog, and thus cannot speak people). For most […]

The American Female Q

In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked by Jonna Méndez

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Jonna began her work at the CIA as a ‘career wife,’ supporting her husband’s job, but soon she started taking on bigger and important roles in the agency, for which she lived all over the world and eventually rose to the position of Chief of Disguise. Having read plenty about the CIA’s origins as the OG old boy’s club in which a lot of men threw ideas at a wall and hoped they’d stick during World War 2, this book was interesting to me for […]

Dangerously in Love

My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

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My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas was a historical romance book club pick from The Ripped Bodice. I sped-read the first half and didn’t return to it last year. And then in February, I remembered, and it was so worth finishing. Ying-Ying, aka Catherine Blade, is a badass. She was trained in martial arts because her guardian/stepfather, Da-Ren, was a Chinese warlord. She makes an enemy of Lin, a dangerous assassin, who relentlessly hunts her across the globe. When the story begins, she is hiding […]



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