Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I have never read anything as bleak or upsetting

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

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[TRIGGER WARNING: Violence, sexual violence, animal abuse] I have written and rewritten a summary of the plot of this book, and I end up in one of two camps: either I have written nothing substantial that would be worth keeping or I have written 4-5 paragraphs to explain everything. Author Donald Ray Pollock has created stories that weave and connect back on each in such incredible ways that it is difficult to summarize. I’ve decided on the insubstantial camp. The book tells the story of […]

With Friends like These…

The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

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Allow me to give you a brief summary of the plot of THE SILENT WIFE: it’s pretty much rapey rapey stabby stabby, blood, guts, gore galore. It’s that kind of book. If you can get past that (and if you can’t, I won’t hold it against you) there’s decent writing and rounded characters, a bit of character assassination, a couple of plot holes and a whole lotta cops being unprofessional.  In The Silent Wife, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents Will Trent and Faith Mitchell and […]

Mit de neus umhoeëg

Blindsighted by Karin Slaughter

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Anything by Karin Slaughter, and this book in particular, should come with a trigger warning, so just so you know: MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING.  In the small, sleepy town of Heartsdale, GA, pediatrician and sometime medical examiner Sara Linton is having an uncomfortable lunch with her nosy sister. When she goes off to the bathroom, she finds a woman bleeding to death. She’s been gruesomely assaulted and within minutes, she dies. It’s up to Sara and her ex-husband, Chief of Police Jeffrey Tolliver, to find the […]

I guess Gaiman already took Trigger Warning as a title…

In Shock by Rana Awdish

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I want to start with the positives. I learned a lot from this book.  I work in health care and related to a lot of the author’s experiences (I went septic after a post partum kidney infection, so it was kind of a cold-water-to-the-face moment reading that 1/3 of patients with sepsis die, and mine was an antibiotic resistant strain. Now I know why the nurse I brought doughnuts for once I recovered looked like she’d seen a ghost when I walked in the door). […]

A somewhat problematic murder mystery

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Last year, I gave up on Cannonball Read in February. I kept reading, but the pressure to review got to be too much, and I ended up too far behind. This year, I’m not going for quantity, but instead am aiming to tackle all the books that I’ve bought over the years that for one reason or another have sat unread on my shelves. The first of these books is The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham, which I bought several years ago at Hatchard’s because […]

Poor Orpheus woke up with a start / all amongst the rotting dead

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I read this maybe a month ago, and was in the midst of a reading malaise that suppressed not only my interest in what I was reading, but made reviewing almost impossible. I just couldn’t transfer my thoughts into a coherent description of the book. I don’t know. I think I’m still in a reviewing funk, but I’m trying to get them posted before I get too far behind. What Dreams May Come is an epistolary paean to one man’s love for his wife; a wife […]



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