Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It’s a perfect story, how mommy saved daddy

Lush Money by Angelina M. Lopez

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Lush Money is a very promising debut from an author I’m looking forward to seeing more from. Recently, I’ve been drawn to low drama romances with characters whose lives are imaginable. Lush Money is high drama and features a self made billionaire and the heir to a small European Kingdom. I loved it. Roxanne Medina is a self made billionaire. She wants a child, wants the child to have a father, but doesn’t want to put in the effort a romance would require. Mateo Esperanza […]

“Finally, if you’re wondering if it counts and it feels like it counts, it counts.” (CBR11 Bingo)

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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When Rainbow Rowell says a book is her favorite of the year, I am going to add it to my to-read list and am likely to track it down relatively quickly. In the case of Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact it fitting into a Bingo Square category (Youths!) made it all the better. Let’s get the big verdict out of the way early: this debut is very good and Choi does the thing that I like best about Rowell’s work, she builds imperfect and entirely […]

It took all the strength I had not to fall apart!

I Am Still Alive by Kate Alice Marshall

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I’m really sorry for naming this review after the most cliche song I could have quoted — OR AM I? Sixteen-year-old Jess has been through it this year.  She survived a terrible car crash that killed her mother on impact. She’s left scarred and her leg is irrevocably damaged, despite the diligence she has devoted to her physical therapy. And now, the court has ordered her custody to the father she has barely known, transported there by an old family friend named Gil. Gil does […]

“My personal motto has always been if you’ve already dug yourself a hole too deep to climb out of, you may as well keep digging.”

Heretics Anonymous by Katie Henry

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Michael Ausman is seething. His father has uprooted their family yet again for a job promotion — this time Michael was barely two months into his junior year. Now he is faced with making yet another new group of friends in another new school, and to make matters worse, that school is a Catholic one. Michael is an atheist, and he has no interest in setting down any roots lest they be ripped back out again. But on the first day of school, he is […]

“Now we have to somehow un-fuck everybody.”

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

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Quick Review: This is a very good YA debut by Angie Thomas and it is important reading to be done in this cultural climate in the United States. Thomas clearly, and evocatively, brings the reader into the layered life of a black teen in today’s United States with its systemic racism. It reminded me of of my own history, and my lived experience, and grew it out. But it isn’t a primer in the way that Between the World and Me is, it is a […]

I want more Jessica Jones in my life…

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Krysten Ritter’s debut novel Bonfire is really just okay. Don’t get me wrong, Ritter can write, but throughout my reading of Bonfire, I kept having the feeling that I’d read this story before. The main character, Abby, is an environmental activist slash lawyer who has returned to the small nothing of a town where she grew up. She is there to prove that the one corporation in town, Optimal Plastics, has been corrupting the opinions and perspectives of residents by providing them with jobs, donating to the […]



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