Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I Mean … Yikes

The World Record Book of Racist Stories by Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar

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Best for: Everyone, but I mean, white folks do really need to give it a read. In a nutshell: This is a follow-up to Ruffin and Lamar’s previous book, You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey. Worth quoting: “That’s why a lot of white people act the way they do: they have a five year old’s understanding of the word ‘racist.’” Why I chose it: I wanted to read their first book but haven’t been able to find an audio version in the UK. Thankfully […]

Everything I know about being an a-hole

Everything I know about love by Dolly Alderton

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I am a big fan of Alderton’s podcast, ‘Sentimental in the City’, which she cohosts with Caroline O’Donoghue. I also recently watched the series based on this book and found it a welcome trip down nostalgia lane. The girls living in a sharehouse, the interloping boyfriends, the crummy jobs, the loose nights. So I came to this book with good will and clean hands, I swear! But while this audio book covers much of the same territory as the tv series, it was somehow a […]

Only read if you really love these characters.

Time's Convert by Deborah Harkness

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I have a weird relationship with Deborah Harkness’s books. I liked her All Souls trilogy, but I also recognize that it has some significant problems (that I won’t get into here). I had assumed those feelings would carry over to this book, a sequel to the trilogy, essentially. It’s billed as being about Marcus and Phoebe’s relationship, but it’s actually just an extended epilogue and very little happens that is of consequence. It’s also very weird. The book is split in three parts. First is […]

A big disappointment.

The City of Dusk (The Dark Gods, #1) by Tara Sim

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On the surface, I can’t really point to any specific reason for my low rating here, so you can write this review off as this simply being the wrong book for the wrong reader, if you want. I do want to say up front that the complaint I’m seeing from most people is that this book “reads like YA”, whatever that means. I don’t agree. This is an adult fantasy book. The characters are younger adults, like age eighteen to mid-twenties, but the writing itself is […]

Well-written but not for me.

I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. I don’t think Courtney Summers is for me. I’ve tried three of her books now. This is an extremely well-written and timely young adult thriller that is supposedly about the death of a young girl found on the side of the road, but it’s really about how the world is built to use up pretty young women and undermine their self-worth, and what that looks like. The main […]

“I’d always write ‘you were the best I ever had.’ Or something stupid like that.”

Tanqueray by Brandon Stanton and Stephanie Sohnson

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Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton teams up with intensely human, long time New York resident Stephanie Johnson to tell a story that doesn’t fit on a single picture’s description on Instagram. Stephanie is something of a tragic figure, although I think she would cringe and resent such a description. But as she told the story of her life (she narrates the audiobook), it was hard for me not to see the bright young girl who had to fight against racism and sexism at […]



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