Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I Wish I Hadn’t Been Spoiled

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

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Best for: Fan of claustrophobic fiction In a nutshell: In the 1600s in Norway, a sudden storm kills nearly all the men in the village of Vardø. A year later, a man is sent to govern the remaining women. Worth quoting: “But now she knows she was foolish to believe that evil existed only out there. It was here, among them, walking on two legs, passing judgment with a human tongue.” Why I chose it: It was in a subscription box and I hadn’t yet […]

“You can’t discover what’s true based on how many people think it’s true.”

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

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I’m not going to let this excellent book be the one that let me get behind in reviews in 2022. I’ve been too intimidated to start writing this review because the book was so smart, so I sat down just now and decided I was going to type until a review came out. So that’s what’s happening here. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is just as cheeky as its title would imply. The book is (darkly) funny, and the story of Katharina Kepler […]

“There are two people inside me and they are at war with each other.”

Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Brian FitzGibbon (Translator)

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This is a book that you have to give yourself over to, you have to meet it where it is and accept its way of imparting the story, of whether there is a story at all, and how the author has built her main character, and how that main character chooses to share her world with you. Once you’ve done that the book embraces you like waves coming onshore. But is it the cold waters of the North Atlantic or something warmer? I have my […]

So Who Stole the Gate?

Murder in the Neighborhood by Ellen J Green

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Told through the eyes of Raymond, a young boy, and Freda, his mother, this is the story of Howard Unruh, who on a sunny day in September 1949 committed a mass shooting in his neighborhood and killed thirteen people. Funnily enough I had recently listened to the Last Podcast on the Left series on this crime (which, you will know if you also listen, puts me rather far behind in the archives). The podcast focused more on Unruh – his early life, his military career, […]

January 2022 Leftovers

Hit Parade by Lawrence Block

Sex Criminals, Volume 1: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky

Devils In Exile by Chuck Hogan

Ex Machina, The Deluxe Edition: Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan

A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny

Munich by Robert Harris

Shella by Andrew Vachss

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

The Accomplice by Lisa Lutz

No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfeld

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

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My resolution for Cannonball Read in 2022 is to only write reviews where I feel like I have much to say and then dump the others in a singular post at the end of the month to track how much I’ve read. This’ll spare me from writing 250+ words about books that I can’t even think of a hundred for. So… Hit Parade **** I enjoy these books and while this is the one I maybe enjoyed the least (did EVERY story need cutaway conversations with […]

Finding Beauty in the Bleakness

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

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This book was loaned to me by a friend about six months ago, and it’s been sitting on my bookshelf taunting me while I worked through a stack of library books before their due dates caught up to me. I had no idea what the book was even about or why my friend thought I would like it, but every time I came close to forgetting about it altogether the vivid  red cover art would grab my attention and I’d move it further up my […]



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