Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Big Finish!

The Toll: Arc of a Scythe Book 3 by Neal Shusterman

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This series is outstanding. This final book hit all the right notes and brought its several storylines together in a coherent, exciting and generally satisfying way. My review of Thunderhead indicated that there was a biblical tone to that book, and that tone is even more obvious in The Toll. But this is not a series about religion so much as about human nature, politics and belief. The Toll brings together four storylines. There is the story of Scythe Faraday and his search for the […]

I’m dying. I’m dead. Murdered by the puppy cannon!

The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan

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CBR15passport recommended ‘You can address me by my preferred title: you idiot.’ I’ve seen references to “the puppy cannon” amongst romance novel fans here on CBR over the years. I never really investigated what it meant and in my head, for some reason, it was “the puppy canon,” like some kind of reference to a specific sub-genre of romance novel. It is not. It is truly the puppy cannon, and if there were to be some kind of puppy cannon canon, I would be all […]

It’s biblical!

Thunderhead: Arc of a Scythe Book 2 by Neal Shusterman

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Thunderhead, the second book in Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy, is a gripping, exciting novel that sets the stage for major conflict in book 3, which I can’t wait to start. Book one introduced the reader to Shusterman’s futuristic world in which all evils seem to have been eradicated: illness, disease, war, crime, even death have been brought under control. In this world, people who meet unfortunate accidents or try to kill themselves can be revived. One is only truly dead when a scythe […]

Too Much and Never Enough

The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan

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CBR15passport recommended I know the Courtney Milan fans out there love this particular book (shoutout to Malin and Narfna) in the Brothers Sinister series and having now read it, I get it. It really is a fantastic novel with characters that I love and an historical set up that resonates still today. The Countess Conspiracy deals with matters of work/family, what “women’s work” is, and that feeling when you are both too much for people and still not enough no matter what you do. The […]

One of my year’s best already?

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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This historic drama has all the elements I love about a book – great characters and a compelling story that we follow through several generations of the same family, from Korea to Japan and beyond. In the background of Pachinko is Japan’s occupation of Korea and the experience of Koreans in Japan before, during, and after this occupation. We begin in the 1880s in Korea. Hoonie is the son of parents who run a boardinghouse for fisherman. Their lives are meager, but stable. Hoonie eventually […]

A nightmare at times, but ended like a dream.

City of Nightmares by Rebecca Schaeffer

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I have to admit, this book gave me at least one nightmare. It wasn’t the worst I’d ever had, but it involved dead puppies, so it was pretty bad. It’s not that I found the book to be scary, per se, but the premise is a great one for a horror movie: For reasons unknown, if people have a nightmare, they will wake up and become their nightmare. This could mean a variety of things. Some people just disappear, so no one really knows what […]



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