Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Strong Succession vibes in Maclean’s new contemporary

These Summer Storms by Sarah Maclean

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4.5 stars CBR17 Book Bingo: Family Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. Alice Storm hasn’t had any contact with her family for five years, since she went public with some unsavoury company secrets and her father disowned her. Now her larger-than-life father, Franklin Storm, is dead, and she has to return to the family’s private island off Rhode Island to pay her respects. She isn’t planning on staying past the funeral, but it seems even in death, […]

A firestorm of a story!

The Story of my Anger by Jasminne Mendez

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The Story of my Anger counts for the “school” square on CBR17 Bingo. I was immediately drawn to The Story of My Anger because Yuli’s pose on the cover is so defiant and powerful, and I knew I wanted to read her story. Told in verse, this book follows Yuli and her group of friends who are trying to prevent the books that have allowed them to be seen in curriculum from being banned. Especially in today’s sociopolitical landscape and how many books are being […]

“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, […]

I’m glad the author is enjoying international success

Stargate - en julefortelling/Brightly Shining by Ingvild H. Rishøi

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Nowhere Book Bingo 25: Local author (the story takes place about 15 minutes from where I work) The full review of this on my blog contains spoilers so if you don’t want to know how the book ends, and why I can’t rate this book higher, skip the paragraphs I’ve highlighted. Ten-year-old Ronja and her sixteen-year-old sister Melissa are used to disappointments, living alone with a father who only occasionally sobers up long enough to hold down a job for a month or two. They’re […]

Racism is a very real thing, even in Norway

Kvit, norsk mann (White Norwegian man) by Brynjulf Jung Tjønn

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Nowhere Bingo 2025: A poetry collection The author of this poetry collection was adopted from South Korea by a childless Norwegian couple when he was three years old. Throughout this rather short, but very impactful poetry collection, he writes about his constant feeling of exclusion and lack of belonging. As a child of Asian descent in a small western Norwegian village surrounded by white people, he obviously stood out among the other children. Adopted by farmers to take over their farm when they grew old, […]

Not a single clue to these murders is found in a fjord

Hildur (The Clues in the Fjord) by Satu Rämö

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Nowhere Books 2025 Bingo: A book in translation Hildur Rúnarsdóttir is a police investigator on Iceland’s harsh and rather sparsely populated west coast. When she was only a child, her two younger sisters disappeared without a trace, and now she’s the head of the division for missing children in her part of the country. Her only remaining relative is her aunt, who she eats dinner with every Monday. Her aunt raised her after her parents died in a car accident about a year after her […]



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