Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About esmemoria

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Eager to get back on the horse this year! In my walking around life, I miss my old, blind pug (the Ancient Mariner), help amazing college students become teachers, and tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: esmemoria's Quick Questions interview.)

esmemoria's Reviews:

A Modern Encyclopedia Brown

All the Wrong Questions: Question 1 by Lemony Snicket

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Dan Handler, writing as Lemony Snicket, wrote the A Series of Unfortunate Events books. I LOVED those books. They were brilliant—funny, smart, and not afraid to dig into hard topics like grief and death. So when I saw this new series, All the Wrong Questions: Question 1 (aka “Who Could that be at this Hour?”), I hopped right on it. The story features Snicket as a 13 year old boy who is roped into a mysterious mission to recover a stolen artifact. He is whisked […]

“Now the only thing I ask is that they respect the loneliness to come”

Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

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Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatín is a very brief book about a man who takes care of people wasting away from an unnamed disease in his beauty salon. Now known as the Terminal, the salon was once the narrator’s pride. It was a dazzling space where he and his two close friends would cut women’s hair and perform other beauty treatments. He describes being thrown out of his family home for being gay and how he built his beauty salon into a successful business. At […]

Mother, Come Home

Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier

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I don’t normally title my reviews the same title as the book I read, but in this case there is nothing else to do. Mother, Come Home is a graphic novel by Paul Hornschemeier about a small boy, Tommy, and the suicides of both of his parents. His mother is so ill from cancer that she asks her husband to help her die, which he does. The emptiness and guilt he feels for killing his deeply loved wife eventually ends in his own suicide, which […]

Don’t Talk to Me about Literary

Invisible Blood by Maxim Jakubowski

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It’s hard to review mystery anthologies like editor Maxim Jakubowski’s Invisible Blood. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I want to be careful what I reveal. There are also so many characters and plots that it’s hard to synopsize. Let’s start here: I enjoyed Invisible Blood. It was clear that Jakubowski has a good eye for a mystery story with a little more depth than just a whodunnit. Not that I don’t like whodunnits—I totally do. But it’s interesting to read a mystery anthology […]

Just….No.

Later by Stephen King

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I love Stephen King. I have loved his books practically my whole life. The Stand and It still hold up, as well as some of his other books and short stories. But his book Later is no classic. I would call it terrible, but it’s more inert than that. Later follows narrator Jamie Conklin from childhood to his early 20s. Jamie can see and talk to the dead (just like The Sixth Sense, which is mentioned). The dead must always tell him the truth, and […]

A Rather Odd Little Collection

Collected Short Mysteries by Ngaio Marsh

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Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealand mystery writer who is often compared to Agatha Christie. Her signature detective, Roderick Alleyn, is not as much a caricature as Hercule Poirot (whom I love, but is decidedly a comical figure). Alleyn is steady, mild-mannered, and modest. He is the best part of Marsh’s Collected Short Mysteries, a short book featuring a few mysteries, a teleplay and some oddities. I enjoyed this collection, but there isn’t an awful lot to say about it. There are some standard short […]



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