Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

We need to tell each other the ugly stuff, the stuff we’re ashamed of.

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim

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CANNONBALL!!!! Yikes. I signed up for the half to give myself some breathing room this year and here I am at a full with over a month left to go. I blame CBR Bingo! This was my book club’s pick for November. It kept popping up in all my normal bookish circles, prominently displayed at the library and virtually pushed by Amazon and Goodreads. Reading it, I suppose, was inevitable. After emigrating from Korea, Young and Pak Yoo work hard to forge a new life that […]

I’m losing my mind

The Memory Book by Lara Avery

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Official book description: “They tell me that my memory will never be the same, that I’ll start forgetting things. At first just a little, and then a lot. So I’m writing to remember.” Sammie McCoy is a girl with a plan: graduate at the top of her class and get out of her small town as soon as possible. Nothing will stand in her way–not even the rare genetic disorder the doctors say will slowly steal her memories and then her health. So the memory […]

A well-rounded portrait of a rock icon

Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren

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Janis Joplin has been the subject of a number of biographies. She is an irresistible topic after all. A rising star, a trailblazer for women in rock whose passion and emotion were evident in every song she sang, she lived hard and died young. Janis performed at Monterey and Woodstock, palled around with other musical greats of the ‘60s and died of a heroin overdose while at the height of her artistic powers. Hers is a story of triumph and tragedy combined. In this biography, […]

Finally trying to learn more about the suffragette movement than what I was shown in Mary Poppins.

Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

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My friend and I recently went to Book Club night at our local — and amazing — book store, One More Page in Arlington, where they discussed Bringing Down the Duke. We had a fun night with a great group, and hope to be back for a gathering in the future. What was interesting to me was that we all agreed that the book was a quick, engrossing read, and that we all liked it. However, most people agreed they probably wouldn’t read the next […]

“She’s not a regular lady”

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart

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Girl Waits with Gun is a charming historical fiction novel based on true events. Amy Stewart sources articles from early 20th century newspapers including the Philadelphia Sun, the Bergen County Evening-Record, and the New York Times, mingles facts with her own imagination, and gives us a sometimes harrowing, often funny suspense tale starring a top-notch heroine. The Kopp sisters are three women living alone on a farm in 1914 New Jersey after the death of their mother. In spite of their brother Francis’s pleas to […]

More ways Wall Street can screw you

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

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I’ve been procrastinating writing this review because, while Michael Lewis is one of my favorite nonfiction writers, this book proved to be a bit of a struggle for me. Maybe that’s because I’m too jaded to be surprised that banks and stock traders had found yet another way to screw over the little guy. Maybe it’s because everything I know about the stock market I learned from Trading Places, so if it’s not about pork bellies or frozen concentrated orange juice, it doesn’t arouse my […]



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