Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Warrior Women with Bad Attitudes

The Unleashing by Shelly Laurenston

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When I spotted The Unleashing by Shelly Laurenston, I had a vague memory that yesknopemaybe gave it a positive review for CBR10. I also remembered that the protagonist was a former Marine. The expectation of a legion of ass-kicking women convinced me to buy it on the spot. With the start of CBR11 Bingo, I was spurred to action to read it for the Cannonballer Says square. As the first book in Laurenston’s Call of Crows series, we are introduced to Kera Watson, the ex-military […]

Weak knees? Not any more.

They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall

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CBR11Bingo – Remix So this is a direct remix of the Agatha Christie novel And then there were None. We know this (so sorry about the spoilers) because Rachel Howzell Hall directly quotes a part of that novel in the epigraph for this novel. But it’s not just that: it also flirts with being a remix of Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game and even more lightly flirts with being a little bit Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got her Groove Back. So the biggest difference between […]

It is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it.

King Solomon's Mines by HR Haggard

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CBR11Bingo – School So the connection to Bingo here is that when I first got to grad school, I was a TA for a Children’s Lit class that mostly focused on the kinds of writing that Victorian children would have been exposed to in their childhood, when the concept of children’s writing was pretty slim in general. This book is an interesting artifact and an interesting historical text in terms of seeing what kinds of cultural teaching was happening through literature, especially as a time […]

Well done

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

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CBR11 Bingo Science square What exactly was it that made Elizabeth Holmes so believable to so many people? Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup gives the history of how Elizabeth Holmes started her company Theranos and how the company fell apart around her. John Carreyrou very thoroughly details every step- from Holmes’ college days to her dropping out, working with two other people on her initial idea of a wearable treatment device and how her original plans turned in to the […]

“Happiness is not just an act of optimism – it is an act of defiance.” (CBR11Bingo)

Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure (Worth Saga #2.75) by Courtney Milan

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Courtney Milan really is fantastic at writing novellas. Even the ones I don’t love are still fantastic reads. The Governess Affair is one of my favorite books, period, and A Kiss for Midwinter is one of the few books I’ve read more than once in the past several years. Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure ranks right up there with them. While the book is part of the Worth Saga books, it absolutely stands alone, which I can attest to because the only other book in the […]

Revisiting an old favorite

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

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CBR11 Bingo Back To School. I haven’t read this book since middle school probably. I did read it repeatedly in my younger years because I identified very much with Jo- never quite doing what was expected of her or fitting in very well, but always with the best of intentions. I have to say that my feelings now aren’t much different than they were twenty-five years ago. Little Women tells the story of the March family during the Civil War years. Mr. March is fighting […]



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