Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What is the meaning of death?

Martyr! A Novel by Kaveh Akbar

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The main character of Martyr! is Cyrus Shams, a thirty year old Iranian American living in a small university town in Indiana. Cyrus is an alcoholic, a drug abuser, and a poet, and he is obsessed with martyrdom. More precisely, he wants to know how to have a good death, a death that means something. This quest is rooted in his past and his family tragedies, but his search for enlightenment will propel him foreword into startling territory.  Cyrus Shams was born in Iran in […]

Probably best to skip the mystery dumplings at the night market

Time Loops & Meet Cutes by Jackie Lau

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4.5 stars Thank you to Netgalley, Jackie Lau and Atria Books for this ARC. My opinions are my own. Noelle Tom feels like she’s in a rut. She’s underappreciated at work, she doesn’t have much of a social life to speak of, and she’s pretty much given up on love and dating. Having worked late yet another Friday evening, Noelle goes to the night market and buys some dumplings from a mysterious old woman who claims they will “give her what she needed most”. Unfortunately, […]

Book people are the best people!

The Door-To-Door Bookstore: A Novel by Carsten Henn

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This charming novel was a local bookstore’s pick for its monthly book club. The bookstore, which I have mentioned in previous reviews, is the Cincinnati Book Bus, which is a non-profit bookstore. They raise money to get books into schools and young readers’ hands, and during the summer months, they have a book bus that takes its wares on the road. The Door-To-Door Bookstore is a perfect choice for their book club, as it is a German novel (translation by Melody Shaw) about an old […]

“This modern love breaks me”

Blue Sisters (2024) by Coco Mellors

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Blue Sisters is about four sisters–except Nicky, the youngest, is dead, and Avery (the eldest organised lawyer one), Lucky (the beautiful model and self-destructive drug-addled party girl), and Bonnie (the sporty one), are flailing, a year on. There is some nuance here–Avery is a former heroin addict about to blow her perfect marriage and house in Hampstead Heath apart; Lucky plays guitar. Bonnie, most intriguingly, is a boxer, and Mellors’s descriptions of her physicality are some of the best passages in the novel: Your knuckles, […]

Giving a voice to the voiceless

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin

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“Of arms and the man I sing,” begins Virgil’s Aeneid, though women are pivotal in his story of war and love. Upon one character, Lavinia, hinges the relationships between the Latins and the Trojans, and yet she has no lines at all in the poem and is tellingly described by Virgil as “ripe for marriage.” Ursula K. Le Guin attempts to correct this injustice by retelling the poem through Lavinia’s eyes. Lavinia is an interesting novel in that, not only does Le Guin give voice […]

Good title, nice premise, lots of characters. . . but something didn’t quite click for me

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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I’ve had The Thursday Murder Club on my list for awhile now and finally happened to be in the library at the same time this novel was on the shelf! I snagged it, and the book waited patiently on my end table for a week or two until its turn came around to be devoured and loved. Turns out, I probably read too many glowing reviews because I found it to be kind of just. . .pleasant? And I struggled to figure out why I […]



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