Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Murder Does Not Take a Vacation

A Share in Death by Deborah Crombie

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Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid was looking forward to a nice vacation in the country after a rough case.  Thanks to his cousin, he’s got a spot at a timeshare in Yorkshire and plans on enjoying his holiday.  Unfortunately, he’s barely been there a night when one of the staff is found floating dead in the pool.  As much as Duncan knows he should stay out of it, when the local investigator starts the case by dismissing it as a suicide, Duncan can’t help but get […]

Nanorrobots Prodigiosos?

Virus. La guerra de los mil millones de años by Juan José Gómez Cadenas; Juan Botas

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So for my European bingo spot, I’m going to review a science book about humanity’s tangles with viruses that eventually builds to the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Virus. La guerra de los mil millones de años‘ (‘Virus. The war of a billion years’) is a bit of a curiosity for me: this book about viruses, diseases, and pandemics, which was written with a Spanish perspective in mind, was completed during the very first few months of the pandemic. The authors state in the introduction that the writing […]

A charming story about a girl and her dog

Runt by Craig Silvey

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Bingo: Taking Flight; Passport: Australia In the tradition of Roald Dahl, Runt is an absolutely charming story about a girl and her dog overcoming adversity, finding community, spreading positivity, and being celebrated for being their deliciously odd selves.   Annie Shearer lives in the down-on-its-luck rural Australian town of Upson Downs, where local baddie Earl Robert-Barren is hoarding water to drive his neighbours off their land so he can buy up their properties.  Her family of oddballs struggles on.   Annie hatches a plan to save the […]

Getting paid to stand around being scary

Standing Heavy by gauZ'

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Bingo: Africa; Postcard: Côte d’Ivoire In Nouchi, the popular slang of the Ivoirian city of Abidjan, standing heavy means a lowly paid job that keeps the employee on their feet.  This witty novel takes us into the heads of young men from Côte d’Ivoire at the end of long chains of Parisian subcontracted security services, their lack of papers overlooked so long as they meet the racist morphological profile – heavy-set, tall, strong, deferential, and scary.  Getting paid for standing is not as easy as […]

How incompetent must a man be to turn a simple hymen breaching into one of the biggest Society scandals in years?

A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

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CBR15 PASSPORT (Stamp #14 : Books From Different Countries. International Waters count I think?) CBR15 BINGO (Relation “ship” Square: Takes place on an actual ship, all sorts of relationships: mother/daughter, romantic, friendship) The seventh novel in Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series is steeped, as they all are, in gender and class politics. Reputation goes hand in glove with those themes and this book really does a deep dive into those murky waters. Again, this is the 7th in the series so spoilers abound. On the run from […]

I have been a character and I have been a narrator, but now I don’t know what I am.

Or What You Will by Jo Walton

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CBR15 PASSPORT (Stamp #13: Different Genres, Metafiction) CB515BINGO: (Europe square. Takes place in Florence, Italy. The city is very much a character in the book.) This is the right book for the right person but I am not that right person. Trying to summarize the plot here is going to be problematic because there are a lot of threads weaving this story. Here goes. A woman, Sylvia, is living in Florence, Italy as she nears the end of her battle with cancer. Sylvia is a successful author […]



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