Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

But did they try more cowbell?

Severance by Ling Ma

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In the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good/adequate/completed review, I’m just going to try and get my thoughts down about this book. Severance was one of my it’s->$4.99-on-Kindle-so-if-I-have-even-the-vaguest-interest-I-will-buy-it impulse purchases. I read the critics’ reviews on Amazon and friends’ ratings on Goodreads, skimmed the free sample to get a sense of what it was about, and was hooked. Unfortunately, my interest had waned by about the third chapter. Severance, which was written in 2018, takes place in 2011 and […]

I got behind again

When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole

Good Girl, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson

The Unsuitable by Molly Pohlig

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

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Doozy of a post coming up because I got way behind whoops. We’ll start with my favorite of the bunch but these are all honestly 3 stars and above, some solid reads here. When No One Is Watching, by Alyssa Cole A gentrification thriller that feels all too plausible and is also a way to learn about the history and impact of gentrification without feeling preached at (I do a lot of preaching). It could be easy to call this a “what if gentrification was […]

What the fuck did I just read?

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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So I am not a horror reader, but I am the kind of reader who judges books by their covers. And this book has an absolutely gorgeous cover. I mean, have you seen this? It’s so beautiful. Anyway, I am still in love with the cover regardless of the fact that I am still so confused by what the hell I am actually reading. As I started writing this, I still had a little over 2 1/2 hours to go in the audiobook, but I […]

Water, water every where you look and everything to see

The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire

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I missed the morning meeting where my coworker mentioned the book The Underwater Welder as part of her book review, but the in the minutes she mentioned that Jeff Lemire’s book was one that she had reread as it was one of her favorite books. And though I only read the minutes, there was something about those few words, and the fact I know some of her reading style, her passion about books, that made me ask to borrow her copy. I put it aside […]

Crime Spree

Skin Deep by Sung J. Woo

The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth and the Case of Two Missing Girls by Jax Miller

Later by Stephen King

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I binged a lot of crime fiction (with one non-fictional exception) as there was a lot of traffic on my already long commute this week, allowing me to synergize eyeball reading with audio. Plus I took off the weekend so I had some extra time… Skin Deep 3 stars So rare, entertaining and enjoyable to have a transracial adoptee as a protagonist. While author Sung J. Woo doesn’t lean too hard on Siobhan’s background, he weaves it in to make her a fully realized person. The […]

Paperback Writer

Later by Stephen King

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Stephen King is a writer who can do anything, but should he? Later, his newest novel out in paperback from Hard Case Crime, is an unusual effort. It is perhaps best taken as a sort of exercise that doesn’t entirely succeed. It is an attempt to write a fairly typical King premise in the style of pulp fiction. Later is written entirely in the first person. The narrator, Jamie Conklin, is a young man relating events from his childhood through to adolescence. Jamie lives in […]



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