Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Moving Past Trauma Into Joy

Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

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When they were just shy of eighteen years old, Eva Mercy and Shane Hall spent one intense and life-altering week together. Fifteen years later, Eva is a best-selling erotica writer living in Brooklyn with her pre-teen daughter. Shane is the reclusive darling of the literary circuit, whose award-winning books are beloved by all. They have not spoken once in all those years. But Shane unexpectedly shows up at a panel on Black literature where Eva is a panelist, and the two cannot deny that their […]

Alex Easton Comes to America!

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

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Alex Easton, our beloved Gallacian sworn soldier, is back for another adventure, accompanied as always by the stalwart manservant Angus. Alex has been summoned to America, of all places, by their friend Dr. Dennison, who was one of the witnesses to the horrors that unfolded at the house of Usher. Dennison’s cousin has gone missing while exploring an abandoned coal mine in the wilds of West Virginia, and Dennison thinks that something supernatural may be afoot. Alex, who is certainly not claustrophobic, agrees to travel […]

Imagine Douglas Adams on Cocaine

Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente

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In Space Opera, we met Decibel Jones, former frontman for British glam band Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, and followed him as he was conscripted into a mission to prove humanity’s sentience – and thus save them from extermination – by placing anything but last in the Metagalactic Grand Prix. Think Eurovision, but in space! Spoiler alert, Decibel Jones succeeded, with the help of a time-traveling red panda and the resulting appearance of a younger version of his long-dead drummer, Mira Wonderful Star. As […]

“What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

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Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A Bookish Memoir/biography CBR17 Pie Chart: Education CBR17 Bingo: Citizen (Nafisi lived and taught in Iran during increasingly more dictatorial strictures against its citizens) Official summary: Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic […]

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]

Fantasy with less romance but more dogs

Assassin’s Apprentice: Book One of the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb

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I’m on a fantasy kick recently, this time without the romance but with plenty of court intrigue, magical powers and violence. Trigger warning for abuse and death (including animals). Assassin’s Apprentice is the first book in Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy, which has been reviewed favorably several times on CBR. Add this one to the favorable reviews. Hobbs includes two very compelling storylines and a cast of interesting characters whose personal motivations and abilities create some thrilling and suspenseful scenes. I tore through this 400+ page […]



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