Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Fiat.Luxury's Reviews:

Intimacies, or, How Lipgloss Led to my 13th CBR Review

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

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I hadn’t heard of Katie Kitamura until there was a small online to-do about her lipgloss. Kitamura, in an interview with New York Magazine, included a $24 lipgloss in a listicle of “15 items she can’t live without.” My regular internet reading brought to me a Hot Take about Katie’s love of this lipgloss, and here’s the Hot Take: including this very silly item in her list is tone deaf (lipgloss in this economy!?), and furthermore, lipgloss has nothing to do with literature, so it’s […]

Sandwich

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

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Sandwich takes place over the course of a one-week family vacation on Cape Cod, at the same cottage our protagonist’s family has been visiting for one week every year. This time, our heroine Rocky is there with her two grown children, and her son’s girlfriend, her husband Nick, and a few days overlap with her parents – thus, she is the sandwich generation, with kids on one side and parents on the other. Also, she makes a lot of sandwiches for the beach days, because […]

My 2025 Robin Hobb journey continues

Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb

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This was my beach vacation read and I have to say I’m on the fence about it. That’s not to say that  I did not stay up way past bedtime to finish this (I did) or that I’m disenchanted with Hobb (not in the least).  I just felt that it wasn’t quite as strong as the second book and not as enchanting and well-paced as the Liveship Trilogy. A high bar, to be sure, but there we are. I have some notes! I will try […]

Queer fantasy novella feat. shape-shifting, mammoths.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

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This was a delightful novella, surprisingly rich for its 100 pages! Here’s the summary: Cleric Chih is a cleric in an order whose mission is to record history accurately. They are traveling via mammoth (!) with a guide, Si-yu, but are attacked and trapped en route by three wild – and hungry – tiger sisters who are also shape-shifters (!) To stall their captors, they propose to tell the human version of the story about the tiger Ho Thi Tao and the human scholar Dieu. […]

Jenny and the Cat Club

Jenny and the Cat Club by Esther Averill

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In February’s installment of “reading out loud to kids” we have Jenny and the Cat Club, a book I bought because it looked cute and had cats. While there is an overarching narrative arc, it’s really a collection of short stories about a shy black cat named Jenny Linksy who lives with a retired sea captain in Greenwich Village in 1944. (Also published in 1944!) Jenny is quite shy but finds community and friendship in the cat club, whose esteemed members include, but are not […]

The forest and the trees

North Woods by Daniel Mason

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I don’t know how to summarize this book – a potpourri of genres (although mostly historical fiction, if you had to pinpoint it), a truly eclectic cast of characters, and incredible prose. The kind of book where you think about the characters after the book is closed, and you puzzle over the last chapter even though he totally stuck the landing (endings are so hard!) Mason somehow describes both the forest and the trees in a very readable and really kinda weird novel. He sharply […]



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