Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“How terrible – to be an ordinary orphan.”

When We Were Sisters: A Novel by Fatimah Asghar

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CBR15passport new to you authors Fatimah Asghar (they/them) is a writer and co-producer of the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+ as well as creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls. They have published poetry and a previous novel, If They Come For Us. Asghar’s parents experienced the chaos and violence of the partition of India and Pakistan and emigrated to the US, where Asghar was born.  Asghar’s parents died when Asghar was a child. While similar events occur in When We Were Sisters, this […]

Big Finish!

The Toll: Arc of a Scythe Book 3 by Neal Shusterman

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This series is outstanding. This final book hit all the right notes and brought its several storylines together in a coherent, exciting and generally satisfying way. My review of Thunderhead indicated that there was a biblical tone to that book, and that tone is even more obvious in The Toll. But this is not a series about religion so much as about human nature, politics and belief. The Toll brings together four storylines. There is the story of Scythe Faraday and his search for the […]

Fake dating and heart-shaped cakes

Not Your Valentine by Jackie Lau

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This was an ARC from the author. My views are my own. Helen Tsang has sworn off love as a lost cause after her boyfriend dumped her last Valentine’s Day and someone filmed it, making her a very involuntary viral sensation. However, as Valentine’s Day is approaching once more, she feels like she is getting excessive sympathy and pity from friends, family, and even the staff of her regular bubble tea shop. She doesn’t really want to field any more questions and decides to ask […]

It is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it.

A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers

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I had heard so many good things about this book that I decided to put a hold on it at my library back at the beginning of Bingo 2022. Like the characters in the novel, this book must have been on a journey, because I never heard from my library, and after Bingo, I forgot about it. In February 2023, a voice mail saying my hold book was ready for pick up left me slightly perplexed. Upon retrieving it, I found A Psalm for the […]

Murder of the Week

A Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz

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I was a touch disappointed in Anthony Horowitz’s last Hawthorne mystery, so I started The Twist of a Knife with my expectations tempered. I love Horowitz’s two Atticus Pünd novels (Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders), and I suspect I’ve been judging the Hawthorne series a little too harshly because of that. I still enjoy them, though, for what they are: light-hearted, fun mysteries that read like episodes of your favorite murder-of-the-week television series. The Twist of the Knife is an entertaining installment. When the novel […]

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

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The Overstory is the type of novel I dread reviewing. At nearly 500 pages,  nine protagonists, and scores of literary and cultural references, there’s so much to unpack that a review could easily become a doctoral thesis if one had the time and inclination. To properly review, I would almost have to start over and take extensive notes as I read, planting even more stickies on all the pages that contain something interesting or pivotal. Reading this book was both exhausting and exhilarating. The novel is […]



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