Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“And he’ll burn our horizons / make no mistakes”

The Song of Achilles (2011) by Madeline Miller

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Spoiler alerts for a Bronze Age epic poem, I guess, also content note for discussion of sex in this review. I liked this but I didn’t love it. Homer’s Iliad is about blood and fire and gods and fate, about a war that made heroes and villains into legends that echoed through the ages (and sometimes switched their positions). The Song of Achilles is about one of these heroes, the titular Achilles, he of the heel, and his lover Patroclus, and it’s…sweet? And (rather surprisingly) […]

A Flavia de Luce word jumble: puppets, weed, a 1950s pregnancy test, and pigeon droppings that save lives

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

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Years ago, when I was going through a reading drought because life was getting in the way, I desperately needed an escape and Alan Bradley’s first Flavia de Luce mystery nudged a little bit of lightness back into my life (I even wrote a review, which is quite out of character for me). Our recent CBR chat about mysteries reminded me how much I enjoyed sinking into Flavia’s wanderings about Bishop’s Lacey, the rural English town she lives in, so I decided it was time […]

I was kind of lost, too

Superman: Lost by Christopher Priest

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This was another Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pick and while I liked it, I did not find it as compelling as Famous Last Words. Superman: Lost is a graphic novel that involves time travel, PTSD, despair and hope. It is a commentary on our current political climate but also a reflection on our responsibility toward others and the duty to help those in danger, even when our help is unwanted. The story opens with Superman and the members of the Justice League going on a mission. Clark […]

‘Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way’

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

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I visited Seoul in March for a flash holiday and on my way back, I stopped in a bookstore at Incheon airport. In their small English section, the only books they provided were English translations of books by South Korean authors or travel guides for the country. No Tim Cook biography, no Mitch Albom, no Dan Brown or whatever else you’d typically find in an airport bookshop. I found that so clever — restricting the English-language offerings to art created by South Koreans. This capitalistically […]

“In my shoes, a walking sleep / And my youth I pray to keep”

Heatstroke (2020) by Hazel Barkworth

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Heatstroke (2020) is clever–cleverer than its cover, certainly cleverer than its title. I remember that the review blurbs on the covers of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (2006) and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me (2012) signposted how terrifying teenaged girls can be–and this is certainly a thing, the way teenage girls are inscribed with contradictions of power and anxiety, and Heatstroke does deal with that–but I remember thinking, well, it’s actually the mother that is fairly fucking monstrous in Sharp Objects, and parental figures are pretty absent […]

The anger is palpable, but so is the sorrow

All My Rage: A Novel by Sabaa Tahir

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This YA novel was published in 2022 and won a National Book Award. It contains many difficult themes and triggers, including: racism, physical abuse, drug use/addiction/overdose, trauma, death and grief, The main characters/narrators in All My Rage are Noor, Salahudin and his mother Misbah. They live in a small desert community in Juniper California, near a military base that employs many in the town. Noor and Salahudin are high school seniors who have been friends since they were little, but when the story opens, near […]



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