Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Just a truly lovely piece of high fantasy

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

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Bingo: I am counting this book for the “Borrow” square on my Bingo card, because I borrowed it from my local library via the Libby app. Sybel, a teenage wizard, has the ability to summon and control animals. She has inherited what is essentially a nature preserve for mythical beasts, where she spends her days caring for poetic boars, magical cats, and majestic dragons, and attempting to summon the legendary white bird known as the Liralen. She has no use for other humans, until one […]

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

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I have to start reading more plays again. This was crazy. I loved every second of it. Devoured every word. And yes dear readers, I have never seen the movie starring Paul Newman or Elizabeth Taylor so I came into this cold. I of course have seen gifs and memes, but never sat and read this play. Also, I had zero idea this was a play at first and written by Tennessee Williams. I am really grateful I sought out a play to read for […]

Skeletons in the closet

The Ghostwriter: A Novel by Julie Clark

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Cbr17bingo G (bingo) The Ghostwriter is a crime/unsolved murder novel that revolves around a father and daughter who are estranged from one another. Their relationship has been damaged by substance abuse, lies and secrets but an unusual set of circumstances reunites them. Will this be an opportunity to mend fences and resolve a sensational double murder? Or will it lead to charges against dear old dad? In June 1975, the bodies of teenaged siblings Poppy and Danny Taylor were discovered stabbed to death in their […]

It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.

Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge

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CBR17 Bingo: School – Literacy is considered dangerous in this world, but Mosca wants to keep learning what she can, which is why she goes with Eponymous Clent and searches out the secret school. Real life provides her a different kind of schooling. Armed with just her ability to read and her murderous pet goose, twelve-year-old Mosca Mye hitches her fortune to that of the smooth-talking conman Eponymous Clent and gets herself tangled up in an adventure that could change the world she lives it, […]

Bleak but Creative

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck

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cbr17bingo: borrow – borrowed from my library Well, this was depressing—but also kind of fascinating. Our narrator Soren, a devout Mormon, dies and ends up in Hell, where he learns that there is a true religion (yes, one that is currently practiced on earth), and it’s not Mormonism. Hell is real, but there are different versions of it, and Soren is sent to one inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Library of Babel” (which I recall reading and enjoying in college). In this library is […]

A spy thriller set in a fascinating post-climate-change-collapsed world

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

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CBR Bingo: ‘N’ I really enjoyed Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August when I read it last year, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t realize that she’d also written other books. I’ve been somewhat struggling to find appropriate books to review for the CBR Bingo “letter” squares, so when I saw Notes from the Burning Age on a recent trip to my local used bookstore, it both fit the ‘N’ square and looked intriguing. Set in a future where the effects of climate […]



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