Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Librarian Hero Story Begins!

A Winter’s Promise: The Mirror Visitor Book 1 by Christelle Dabos

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Cbr14bingo Cold A Winter’s Promise is the first book in a YA quartet by French author Christelle Dabos. It’s 490 pages long, and I tore through it within a few days. Book #2 is already queued up and I’m hoping that the storytelling continues to keep me hooked in. Dabos has created a steampunk world that has been divided not just politically and culturally, but also physically due to a “rupture.” Long in the past, a formerly unified planet broke up into different planets or […]

CBR14 Bingo – Week 8 Check-in

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Welcome to the Week 8 CBR 14 Bingo Check-in! You can see the card and the rules on the kick-off post. This week’s mood: Peaches! Plums! Cherries! Any kind of stone fruit really. This is the point at which every year I realize stone fruit season is almost over and I haven’t made a single cobbler, pie, or cake. And then I go overboard and further realize that no one around me wants to eat stone fruit at every meal, not even in a pie. […]

It’s Only a Matter Of…

Trust by Hernan Diaz

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Read as part of CBR14Bingo: Dough. The book involves a man who makes a lot of money (“dough”) off the stock market in the 20s and 30s and how stories revolve around him. I was excited to get this one given both the premise and reviews. I have a yen for these kinds of neo-Gatsby stories set in the early part of the 20th century that examine finance and/or gangsterism juxtaposed with the American Dream. Legs by William Kennedy qualifies for this label, as does Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan […]

In Pursuit of Destiny and Desire

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

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I felt like a bit of a dumb-arse after picking up She Who Became the Sun. I don’t know if it was just me stumbling around blindly perhaps, but it took me a good long time to realise that the this book was a reimagining of the Ming Dynasty’s rise to power. The ebook version of the book didn’t have a blurb on the back cover, true, and that might have helped. But it did have a map of  north east of China on one […]

What if we’re underwhelmed instead?

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

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Karen Joy Fowler’s book starts in the middle with a bang, with her main character, Rosemary Cooke, away at college and undergoing some youthful rebellion. Rosemary tells us of what seems like her idyllic early life back in the mid-west: she has two loving parents, an older brother, Lowell, and a younger sister, Fern. Lowell is someone to look up to while Fern is Rosemary’s shadow half- they are raised to do everything together, dressed in matching outfits and speak in their own language. Rosemary […]

Cozy Botswanan Mystery

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

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This is the first novel in the eponymous long-running series (22 books over 20+ years) by Alexander McCall Smith. It introduces us to Mma Precious Ramotswe, a canny and capable Botswanan woman who takes her inheritance from her father to start a detective agency in Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone. Rather than a single mystery, the novel is structured more like short stories with overlapping characters, albeit progressing in time- each chapter is a new small mystery for Mma Ramotswe to solve. This first installment […]



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