Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Over her golden yard and the glittering hills beyond, into the darkness of the trees…”

Golden Age by Jane Smiley

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***Spoilers throughout*** Well, I finished this trilogy and this was a better book than the second one. I think because Smiley starts killing people off in this one, the cast feels less unwieldy and more focused. This book is more of a victory lap in terms of drawing everyone’s narratives to a close. I again had the issue that such dramatic things happen to these people that it feels unrealistic and kept taking me out of the narrative. Any time I spend most of the […]

“Shara’s not nice. Shara’s so many more important things than nice.”

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

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4.5 stars It’s not exactly easy being Chloe Green, the bisexual girl with two mums when also trying to become valedictorian at Willowgrove Christian Academy in a small Alabama town. She keeps trying to protest against the school’s puritanical rules with frequent dress code violations, but also has to make sure she doesn’t actually end up expelled. Chloe has friends, having quickly befriended the other queer kids at Willowgrove, but she’s mostly avoided interacting too much with the rest of the student body. Everything changes […]

“You can’t change how other people think and act, but you’re in full control of you.”

Dear Martin by Nic Stone

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4.5 stars ustyce McAllister is a seventeen-year-old with a bright future, thanks to his grades and being lucky enough to have a mother who has worked herself to the bone to send him to the prestigious prep school in Atlanta. Then one evening, when trying to help his extremely drunken ex-girlfriend get home safely (she’s half-black, but looks more like her Norwegian mother than her black dad), he’s detained by a very aggressive cop who’s convinced he was trying to carjack and abduct the girl. […]

The Bad Friend We Can’t Resist

Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner

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It had been years since I’d read anything by Jennifer Weiner. I’m not sure why, exactly. Years ago, I enjoyed Good In Bed quite a bit, a novel about a woman whose ex-boyfriend writes an article about loving someone plus-size, and In Her Shoes, a story about two very different sisters (which was made into a movie starring Cameron Diaz). I also admire the the writing shes’s done over the years about how the literary world doesn’t take women’s fiction seriously, relegating popular books written […]

Out in Paperback April 19!

How to Become a Planet by Nicole Melleby

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With the paperback of How to Become a Planet coming out April 19th, I have to share my review of this delightful middle grade novel that made me cry so much and healed my heart. Melleby’s books are some of my absolute favorites when I need a story that will make me spend a couple hours wrapped up in my feelings and getting a cathartic cry. You’re going to want tissues on hand when reading How to Become a Planet, but in the end the crying […]

Sorry, not the next Bridget Jones.

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

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I really hate when I get so excited about a book and it’s just a dud. And this one was for sure a dud. And it sounded so cute! That title! Nigerian immigrants in Britain! A black Bridget Jones bemoaning the pressures of being single! But it was just . . . uninteresting. I mention Bridget Jones because 50% of the reviews I’ve read of it compare it to Bridget Jones’s Diary, and aside from this also focusing on singleness as a topic, they couldn’t […]



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