Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Tolentino Gateway Drug

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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My boss bought me Trick Mirror, a collection of nine essays by The New Yorker, Jezebel, and The Hairpin writer Jia Tolentino, for my birthday this year. As usual, she’s gifted me something meaty to absorb that suits my tastes well. The collection of essays in Trick Mirror includes a range of topics spanning marriage, the 2016 election and Trump presidency, life as a teen reality tv ‘star’, Big Tech, and religion. But it’s not just a bunch of millennial naval-gazing reflection. This is a well-researched, sourced, […]

Frozen Meets Fiddler on the Roof

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This was a highly entertaining mashup, drawing from several familiar sources, but with very much its own unique story to tell.  The fairy tale influences range from The Snow Queen to Rumpelstiltskin but with the addition of Tsarist Russia’s history with its Jewish population tossed in too.  But the core of the story has to do with three very different women who are each unwillingly matched up with a husband who is repulsive to them, and the means they each take to solve their dilemma. […]

“I believe we have to laugh and shudder in order to understand our own human history, which is partially an inheritance of death.”

Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History by Tori Telfer

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Here in the time of Covid Quarantine I find myself struggling to focus on reading most books. I need something that I can bounce in and out of and apparently books about serial killers are my jam right now. Hot on the heels of my last book, I picked up Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History by Tori Telfer which I received as a Christmas gift (I am also officially out of dead tree format library books). I had been excited to read it when […]

When the poet laureate comes to town

In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo

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I don’t usually read poetry collections for funsies, or much at all really. But when the Poet Laureate of the United States decided to do a talk/reading at the mid-level state school where I work, I made an exception. To decide if I wanted to brave the crowds, I got a copy of one of Joy Harjo’s collections In Mad Love and War from the library. I don’t often enjoy a lot of contemporary poetry; I’m a little too much of a formalist for that […]

The Bisexual Bootlegging Love Army

Beyond Series Bundle Volume 2 (Books 4 - 6) by Kit Rocha

Beyond Series Bundle Volume 3 (Books 7 - 9) by Kit Rocha

Beyond Series Novella Bundle by Kit Rocha

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I am struggling with this review, because a lot of what I said in my review for the Beyond Series Bundle Volume 1 is true for the three bundles I am attempting to review here. The overarching themes of the series are freedom to determine your own life, freedom to love who you love, bodily autonomy – including consent and reproductive freedom, and over coming the many forms of toxic masculinity. All of this was present in the first bundle of books, and all of […]

Sometimes you just need to watch it all burn

Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan

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4.5 stars This novella is part of The Worth Saga, and stars one of the minor supporting characters of After the Wedding. You really don’t need to have read that book, though (unless you want to, it’s good, but sad), this story stands perfectly on its own. From the author’s website: Mrs. Bertrice Martin—a widow, some seventy-three years young—has kept her youthful-ish appearance with the most powerful of home remedies: daily doses of spite, regular baths in man-tears, and refusing to give so much as a single damn […]



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