Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The girl, the mother, the countess and the parrot

The Hotel Balzaar by Kate DiCamillo

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Author Kate DiCamillo is one of those authors I find myself having hits and misses with. I still consider her an author I enjoy, but I’m not always the audience she was going for. With that said, I was excited when I found a copy of The Hotel Balzaar (illustrated by Júlia Sardà) in our (unfortunately) damaged books. I had been wanting to read something that was a novel to break my graphic novel habit (as you know a favorite genre) but nothing too heavy. […]

Dung Dung! Holmes is on the case…. sort of

Paw & Order Vol. 1: The Grilled Cheese Caper by Jason Platt

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If your age five and up reader is looking for a cute mystery with the elements of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson meets Law and Order meets Colombo quality then you want Paw & Order Vol. 1: The Grilled Cheese Caper by Jason Platt. Mostly the shorter graphic novel is based in a Holmes and Watson dynamic (a cat and dog), but our cat hero is a bit more goofy than Holmes, so has the bumbling feel of Columbo. Of course, Columbo was much more […]

Alas, No Pagan Rituals Involved. But Still a Fun Read.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

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OK, gotta admit, this was not the genre I was expecting when I started reading.  Upstate New York Gothic is my third favorite type of Gothic (after OG British Gothic and Mexican Gothic), but it took me a minute to realize that this was not that.  Lack of girl school on the lake, to start with.  So what we are actually looking at is a missing child, actually two of them, story. The Van Laars are a wealthy banking family who own a large bit […]

Neighbors can be a nuisance, especially when they start murdering each other

Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

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Neighbors. If they aren’t blasting their radio at 4 a.m. or blocking your driveway, they’re cutting down trees or letting their kids ride their skateboards over your flowerbed. Disagreements between neighbors don’t usually lead to murder, though, unless you live in Florida or are a character in the fifth installment of the Hawthorne & Horowitz mystery series by Anthony Horowitz. Close to Death centers on a gated neighborhood called Riverview Close, comprising just six homes. Five of the households get along splendidly, but the newest […]

A Flavia de Luce word jumble: puppets, weed, a 1950s pregnancy test, and pigeon droppings that save lives

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

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Years ago, when I was going through a reading drought because life was getting in the way, I desperately needed an escape and Alan Bradley’s first Flavia de Luce mystery nudged a little bit of lightness back into my life (I even wrote a review, which is quite out of character for me). Our recent CBR chat about mysteries reminded me how much I enjoyed sinking into Flavia’s wanderings about Bishop’s Lacey, the rural English town she lives in, so I decided it was time […]

One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware

One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware

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The ending and reveal on how things ended up the way they did really just ruined my enjoyment of this book. I really wish that Ware had went a different way with this one. I liked the whole idea of this being a homage of “And Then There Were One” with everyone being moved to a deserted island via a reality tv show. But once you get to how they all got there and why and the big gaping plot holes about why X and […]



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