Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Is That Sweet? I Guess So

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

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The first time I tried Intermezzo, I didn’t last ten pages. This was the fault of Conversations With Friends. I read it earlier this year in anticipation of Intermezzo and found it disappointing. I gave it a reluctant 4-stars but with more distance, I find myself continuing to dislike it. I never cared for the central relationship and while Rooney has talent, it’s evident that this was her first book and she was not yet fully confident in telling stories like this. My first go round with Intermezzo, I’m again introduced […]

July-August 2024 Leftovers

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

Confucius for Christians: What and Ancient Chinese Worldview Can Teach Us about Life in Christ by Greg A. Ten Elshof

Lucky At Cards by Lawrence Block

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block

Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner

Doing the Devil's Work by Bill Loehfelm

The Kneeling Man: My Father's Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Leta McCullough Seletzky

The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter

Burning Angel by James Lee Burke

The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright

Poetic Justice by Andrea J. Johnson

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Because I’ve been posting most of my reviews due to Bingo, I haven’t kept up with the leftover ones until now. Hope everyone had  a good summer. It’s my least favorite time of year but this one wasn’t so bad. Heartsick***: I took this book too seriously when I tried to read it the first time. I relaxed and enjoyed the ride the second. Goofy fun, nothing more. Brief Answers to the Big Questions****: I do enjoy listening to Hawking’s desire to push the boundaries […]

The Luck of the Irish

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

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Retired detective Tom Kettle sits in his wicker chair in front of the window of his seaside apartment in a small, nameless Irish village. He watches the cormorants, he looks at the boxes of books he still hasn’t put up, and he thinks about cleaning his oven and about his deceased wife June, his long-lost children. One day, two detectives show up at his door to ask about a cold case: a priest, stabbed and thrown off a cliff a decade or so earlier. New […]

Chilling.

Snow by John Banville

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It’s impossible for me to review this novel without providing SPOILERS, so read at your own peril.  Rural Ireland, 1957. Detective St. John Strafford (with an R) has been summoned to a country estate in the south-east of Ireland, where a Catholic priest has been found dead in the house of a Protestant land owner. The real kicker: the priest has been castrated. It’s December and the countryside is cloaked in a thick blanket of snow that chokes out sound and hides evidence. Under the […]

A promising debut novel

The Write Escape by Charish Reid

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3.5 stars Nowhere Book Bingo: A book with a BIPOC author and main character CBR16 Sweet Books: Cozy In very short order, Antonia Harper has lost her job and discovered that her fiancée was cheating on her, very shortly before the wedding. The honeymoon was supposed to be in Ireland, and Antonia decides to travel there by herself. Her spiteful ex has cancelled their original reservations, but she rents a cottage to stay in instead. With nothing else to distract her, Antonia decides to make […]

Nobody knows the Troubles I’ve seen

Cal by Bernard MacLaverty

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‘Would you die for me?’ asks Marcella from Cal after they’ve spent the night together, just the two of them, in a remote farm where Marcella lives with her children and her late husband’s parents. In flashbacks we learn that Cal had been the driver of an execution squad that has killed Marcella’s police officer husband in their doorsteps and gravely injured Marcella’s father-in-law. He hasn’t told Marcella any of this,  of course. The novel tells the story of Cal McCluskey who is a young […]



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