Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Decent story, could have used another edit

The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer

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I’ve read some excellent historical fiction recently featuring strong female leads, and this novel had the potential to join those ranks. It’s certainly very popular on Goodreads, with many readers noting how it made them cry, so I feel rather like a grinch giving this a mild, three-star review, just on the positive side of a thumbs up. The story has potential and does feature interesting characters. Nevertheless, I was let down by the execution. The novel alternates between two timelines. In pre-World War II Poland, […]

“It sounds like your dream broke, and you’ve been picking up shattered pieces and blaming yourself when your hands bleed.”

Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert

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Eve is the youngest and seemingly flightiest of the three privileged Brown sisters. She’s always felt like the odd duck in the family, neither as focused nor as intelligent as her two older sisters and completely unable to settle on anything for very long. When she abruptly closes down her wedding planning business after one single event (a generally very successful wedding, that nevertheless descended into some chaos after Eve took it upon herself to liberate all the doves that the bride had wanted, and […]

As an aunt of an autistic nephew I’ve used some of the tricks and plan on using others.

Little Victories by Yvon Roy

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I started Little Victories by Yvon Roy on a Saturday and because it was not an easy read (subject and the presentation is weighty), finished it on Sunday. After I was done, I knew three things: I was going to have to get a copy for my sister and cousin, I was going to write a long review and I was not sure how to recommend this book so that it would be “publisher friendly.” I mean, I liked it, but I did not like […]

Sex lessons premise + multi-layered characters + an earnest HEA = a contemporary romance that gripped my heart

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

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I finally read The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang. I have to confess that I’m reading this loose series out of order. I reviewed The Bride Test last year, which made me cry it was so sweet. This year, I’m reviewing it for CBR12 bingo square with the “Cannonballer Says” square. Looking at the past reviews, nearly all my CBR romance peeps raved about it. And it did not disappoint! Stella Lane loves her job predicting customer behavior using complex math. In her personal life, […]

Spot on

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon

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I was pleasantly surprised re-reading this book, fully expecting it to go to the resale pile as I remembered very little about it other than that it was a mystery about a dead dog solved by a teenager with autism. I was even less enthusiastic after reading House Rules (see previous review), which very much read like a book by someone who was trying very very hard to understand autism rather than someone who actually did. That’s the difference between the books though, Haddon reaches […]

I bet that golden ticket makes the chocolate taste terrible

Switched On by John Elder Robison

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The elevator pitch for this book is “Awakenings for Autism,” but it’s obviously more than that. John Robison is pretty up front about – well, everything because of that aforementioned Autism, but more importantly – becoming the voice of high functioning Autism (previously Asperger’s) by virtue of having written a memoir and without any scientific background in neuroscience. Which isn’t entirely fair, because Look Me In the Eye is an exceptionally well crafted memoir that gives the reader a sense of how Robison thinks, not […]



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