Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


My Second Tove Jansson and the Newest Murderbot

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

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Platform Decay by Martha Wells At this point, the Murderbot books are basically comfort reads. If you’ve read enough of them, you have a general idea of what’s going to happen and how things will end up, always accompanied by a healthy dose of snark and sarcasm from Murderbot. In this one, we start off with Murderbot tagging along with Three, another “rogue” SecUnit, at the start of a rescue mission. Said rescue mission goes awry pretty quickly, because this is a Murderbot book. At this point […]

Lovely Relationship Between Grandmother and Granddaughter

The Summer Book by Tove Jannson, translated by Thomas Teal

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This was a lovely little book that’s a quick read and also occasionally, and unexpectedly, made me laugh out loud. Translated from Finnish, it’s the story of young Sophia and her grandmother, told in vignette form. They spend their summers on one of the many Finnish islands. Sophia’s father is there in a limited way; the focus is on Sophia and her grandmother as they explore the island and talk to each other. There are also symbolic references to the death of Sophia’s mother, which […]

A Beautiful, Quiet, Reflective Book

The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten, translated by Alison McCullough

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CW: violent animal death This is a quiet, reflective book with beautiful, emotionally restrained prose that somehow still manages to be gently emotional. Nils Vik wakes up on what he knows will be the last day of his life and goes about his normal daily routine. He is a ferryman in Norway, someone who has spent decades carrying people across a fjord, and on this final day he follows a familiar route while also collecting the dead. These are former ferry passengers he once knew, […]

A Historical Fantasy, A “Neon-Noir” Horror, and Litfic with Magical Realism

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

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Emily’s Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales I loved being back in the world of Emily Wilde, so I had such a warm feeling reading this book, even though the stakes in this book are higher in some ways compared to the first two in the trilogy. In this one, Emily and Wendell go to Wendell’s home realm in Faerie to reclaim the throne and are met with some challenges along the way. Just as we did in the first two books, we get occasional reminders […]

A Cozy Middle Grade Book

Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono

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I was looking for a cozy book after finishing the first two books in the Farseer trilogy, and this is just what I needed. Translated from Japanese, it follows 13-year-old witch Kiki. The tradition in her world is for witches to travel to a new town that does not already have a witch at some point after turning 13 and establish a life there, and they can’t go home for a year. Kiki’s magical ability is that she can fly on a broom. She lands […]

Not a single clue to these murders is found in a fjord

Hildur (The Clues in the Fjord) by Satu Rämö

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Nowhere Books 2025 Bingo: A book in translation Hildur Rúnarsdóttir is a police investigator on Iceland’s harsh and rather sparsely populated west coast. When she was only a child, her two younger sisters disappeared without a trace, and now she’s the head of the division for missing children in her part of the country. Her only remaining relative is her aunt, who she eats dinner with every Monday. Her aunt raised her after her parents died in a car accident about a year after her […]



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