Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Hustled

Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O'Brien

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Read as Part of CBR16 Bingo: games. Pete Rose is a former baseball player and this is a book based on his life. As I said last year in my review from Eight Men Out, I’ve always had mixed feelings on Pete Rose. Along with the Black Sox, he’s the one most famously banned from baseball due to a sort of gambling scandal. The rampant denialism got under my skin and I’ve just never liked the guy. I’ve softened a little, not because Rose has […]

This whole race of aliens forgot how to have children. CBRBINGO – Celestial

The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei

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This was really good! So much better—and different—than the author’s first book. If you want a fun space opera with some adventure packed in, I have a book for you. Maya Hashimoto used to be the Robin Hood of art thieves–stealing from the rich and their museums, and giving back to the alien civilizations where they were stolen from. Maya lives in a world where First Contact happened ages ago, humans still kind of ruined the planet, but also moved out to colonize the stars. […]

The realness of the story is what makes it so terrifying

Tell Me What I Am: A Novel by Una Mannion

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Cbr16bingo Golden, +2 bingos This novel won the Crime Writer Association’s 2024 Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year. It is a riveting, disturbing and heartbreaking story that I didn’t want to put down. At the center of it is the disappearance of Deena Garvey and its impact on her daughter Ruby and sister Nessa. Una Mannion takes us back to the events leading up to Deena’s disappearance and then forward some 15 years later where the reverberations of this traumatic event […]

“…all you can truly say of any historical event … is that ‘something happened.’”

The Sense of an Ending: A Novel by Julian Barnes

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Cbr16bingo Free Spot (sub for Rings square), +3 bingos The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel that won the Booker Prize. It is short but manages to delve into deep themes regarding memory, history and remorse through a story with a surprising finish. Told in two parts by the same narrator, Tony Webster, the reader must constantly question Tony’s memory and reliability, as he himself does. Part 1 of the novel finds Tony as a teenager in the 1960s with his friends in […]

Camelot Was Always a Lie

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan

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CBR16 Bingo: Golden – Callahan attacks the golden myth of Camelot and the Kennedy family, revealing the dark and dangerous truth underneath. Lurking in the darker corners of the Kennedy family legacy are the many women whose lives turned out worse for the association. In this book, Maureen Callahan tries to bring them to light. I’m familiar with many of the people and stories in this book, but Callahan does an excellent job of placing them in context of each other, weaving across generations and decades to […]

I Liked Them Both

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

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CBR Square- Horses I read Percy Jackson & The Olympians book 1- The Lightning Thief at the same time my son and I watched the series on Disney + and we really liked them both. He’s not done with the book but he has other books he’s reading first so that’s fine. There are a few differences between the two but the basic plot of the tv series and the book are the same. It’s fun to see the “shocking betrayal” through your kid’s eyes […]



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