Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

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It’s weird. I thought I read this book years ago and just realized as I was reading, nope. I think I got the movie mixed up in my head. This is going to be a short review, this was very good. Tom Ripley is a hot mess and you keep waiting for him to get caught, but he does not. I also felt a strange pity for this character because he seems hell-bent on not being thought of as queer, but one wonders if he […]

Riveting and Original Thriller

Underground Airlines by Ben Winters

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Bingo: Green Every day is two worlds; every day we split into two.” I often can’t remember when or why I picked up a book for my TBR. I’ve had Ben Winters’s Underground Airlines for quite a while, but I don’t know what led me to the book. A review? Browsing in the bookstore? However I came across it, I don’t think I realized how good it would be. It is the 21st century and four states–the Hard Four–still allow slavery. This came about through […]

Meat(ball) Cute

Tourist Season by Brynne Weaver

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CBR Bingo: ‘Purple’ I loved Brynne Weaver’s Ruinous Love trilogy (consisting of Butcher & Blackbird, Leather & Lark, and Scythe & Sparrow) about serial killers falling in love, so I had been eagerly awaiting her latest novel, Tourist Season, ever since it was announced. Released last month, this is the first in a planned trilogy, set in the same universe as the Ruinous Love series, but with (mostly) new characters. The main characters are Harper, a resident of the seaside tourist town of Cape Carnage, and […]

A piece of the story

Song of a Blackbird by Maria van Lieshout

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To be honest, I have a lot of books that get misplaced. I put them in safe places and well, they are so safe even I can’t find them. But there is always a way to find them. And with Song of a Blackbird by Maria van Lieshout that way was the library and interlibrary loan.  A powerful and beautifully done story of family and the horrors of war unfolds across the pages. As it is told via a blackbird, things at times become almost […]

Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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Reviews of The Handmaid’s Tale almost invariably start like a collective trauma memory: where were you when it happened? I was twenty-ish, an English major at a nearby university. I was taught how to analyse literature, but not how to consume it, how to distinguish it, and I don’t think we ever read this one for class. Needless to say, most of my professors were middle-aged men. I did read it, though, and it stuck with me; I read it again a few years later. […]

The Last Samurai

Yojimbot Volume 1: Metal Silence by Sylvain Repos and Noiry

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Yojimbot Volume 1: Metal Silence by Sylvain Repos and Noiry There is something about this book I liked a lot. There wasn’t a new theme, but the way it was presented really captured me. We start “at the end” of things, or we don’t know why we are finding ourselves in a rundown, abandoned park that not-so-nice (to say the very least) military and/or government scientists inhabit. The artwork is clever, but I’ve seen it before, yet I really was into it. There is a […]



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