Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“If you think you didn’t save me too, you couldn’t be more wrong.”

Where You're Planted by Melanie Sweeney

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This is a sneaky, emotional book about what community is and what it means to people.   I don’t remember exactly what made me put this on my to read list back in April, but one of the reviewers I follow reviewed it as an ARC in March and described its vibe as “echoes of Nora Roberts with a flair of Anita Kelly + Kate Clayborn that really made me smile and tugged at my heart”. Okay, La Nora has had diminishing returns over the […]

“Because being of utility was more than I had expected, and yet one still does not want to be used. Of use, but not used.”

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Ann Older

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The Mimicking of Known Successes can be quickly described as what if Sherlock Holmes, but sapphic and in a sci-fi future where the Earth is uninhabitable and humans have colonized Jupiter?   Malka Ann Older’s resume is a wide combination of things, and it feeds directly into the kind of book that The Mimicking of Known Successes is. We have here a book that examines what happens next when final resources are used to leave Earth, but the goal is to go back. Pleiti is our […]

“This is how it works, with people who wield abuse like a knife and convince us they’re cutting us with love.”

The Ones We Burn by Rebecca Mix

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CBR17 Bingo: O – The title starts with O. When Ranka is sent south to fulfill a treaty between humans and witches by wedding the crown prince, she goes only so that she can try to bring the system down from the inside. But as she gets to know Galen and his twin sister, the brilliant and beautiful Princess Aramis, she begins to realize that the truth about the conflict between their people may be different than what she’s always believed. What I really enjoyed […]

This book ruined my productivity

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen

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Bingo Row 5 – arts What if Harriet Tubman somehow came back from the past to the modern world? What would she do? Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen says that Harriet Tubman would be the MC in a hip-hop band with some people she led to freedom and a stoned Benjamin Lay. The book is told in the first person by Darnell, Harriet Tubman’s producer. He works with Harriet to put her stories to music. They gossip about Frederick Douglass […]

“Me, I don’t have a name. I lost it in battle, like the knight who lost his shield.”

The Coin: A Novel by Yasmin Zaher

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Cbr17bingo Migrant (bingo) The main character has moved from her native Palestine to the US  The Coin is narrated by an unnamed main character, a woman maybe in her 30s who left Palestine for New York City but has an uncomfortable relationship with the city and its people. She is telling her story to someone. Is she talking to another unnamed person? To us? To herself? The narrator is fascinating, intelligent woman of wealth and taste, but she also a few neuroses that make her […]

“Saul of my pody, put you are wrang there my friend. It is your fat Englishmen that eat up our Scots cattle, puir things.” Got that?

Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott

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cbr17bingo Culture Rather an odd duck, this one.  Some legal jibber-jabber in the frontpiece seems to indicate that this book was not intended to be sold in the US, yet I bought it at the UCLA bookstore.  Hmm.  Anyway. First, let me digress.  I grew up in a small town with a small library, and there really was no other source of books for me other than that, and my Mom’s Book-of-the-Month Club, when she could afford it.  So imagine my thrill, when I started […]



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