Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Eliza Has Monsters

Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

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Eliza has external and internal monsters. She has the external high school kind of monsters who like to pick on and reject anyone who seems different. She has the internal monsters of anxiety and insecurity. And of course, she has the monsters that she has created for her webcomic. Eliza is the creator of a highly popular webcomic called Monstrous Sea. She publishes under a pseudonym, and very few people in her life know that she and her nom de plume LadyConstellation are the same person. […]

It’s rather a lot to tell. But I suppose I should start with the parrot.

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske

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CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #4: Books from different countries. Do international waters count? If not, written by an Australian.) This is the second book of the Last Binding Series. If you haven’t read it yet, by all means read the first in the series that I reviewed here: A Marvellous Light. It’s a surprisingly fresh take on the well-worn “magic is real” carpet set in the early 1900s. Spoilers abound if you haven’t read the first book. In the aftermath of Robyn and Edwin’s discovery that snobby magical aristocrats are conspiring […]

We are women without a voice…We are women out of time and place, without even the language of the country we reside in.

Women Talking by Miriam Toew

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CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #3: Books from different countries. Set in Bolivia about a Mennonite community written by a Canadian.) This book is a lot. Whatever triggers you have will be triggered. Toew’s novel is based on a real-life series of sexual assaults that occurred at a Mennonite colony in Bolivia in 2005. The victims ranged in age from 3 to 65 and the assailants were their friends and family members. Drugged with animal tranquilizers, the women would wake bloodied and bruised with no recollection of what had taken […]

Because when women understand chemistry, they begin to understand how things work.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #2: Books recommended by friends. Friends, grocery store clerks, Cannonballers, everyone who has ever read it….) Everyone on the planet has probably read this book already. Many of you reviewed it. It took me forever to actually get to it myself. And I have reasons. So, this will mostly be a review (Can I call it a review? I’m going to call it a review.) about why it took me so long to read a book that hit pretty much all of my buttons. A […]

We Should Have Seen It Coming

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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I am a mood reader prone to slumps and I also rely on my public library (and four additional in-state systems who have reciprocal relationships with my county – libraries are a miracle and you should support yours more) so I don’t always get to read the hot new book when it is hot and new. I know this was the big book around here last year, I read the stats post. So I doubt I’m adding anything new to the conversation here when I […]

Pride, Prejudice and Social Justice

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

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During my high school years, I was introduced to Jane Austen and the Brontes but for some reason never Elizabeth Gaskell. She was a contemporary of the Brontes, friend to and biographer of Charlotte, and in her novel North and South she channels both the dark undercurrents of the Brontes and the romance of Austen. Over the years, on social media, I’ve seen references to “ThorntonThursdays” with pictures and video clips but I only recently discovered that they came from the 2004 BBC series North […]



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