Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You are the queen. You are the queen that Antoinette wanted to be . . .”

Antoinette's Sister by Diana Giovinazzo

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CBR17 Bingo: Black – Behold, the cover. Though her tragic sister Marie Antoinette is better known today, Maria Carolina Charlotte, the queen of Naples, ruled with better success but faced her own share of troubles and tribulations in her years on the throne. The thing with historical fiction is that the story can live or die by the events it’s based on, especially when it follows the life of a historical figure. Luckily, Charlotte is an interesting main character. Though her attitudes toward the monarchy […]

“You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence, my therapist once said.”

Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood

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Nowhere Book Bingo 2025: A book set on vacation   Official plot summary (because it’s better than anything I could come up with): Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life.   Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him.   It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor […]

I think y’all are nuts!

The Last of the Giants: An Ultra Running Graphic Novel by Doug Mayer

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Why would anyone in their right mind want to do a 200-mile marathon? Something that would take you at least 6 days to finish? A trek that isn’t just in the “sweet, wide open mid-west of the country,” but in the Italian Alps? Well, I did say their right mind. The Last of the Giants: An Ultra Running Graphic Novel by Doug Mayer is based on Mayer’s own experiences as someone who has been on several extreme hikes. As I read via an online reader […]

“The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

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In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, more than 7000 Athenian prisoners of war are left to rot in Syracuse’s quarries – except a select few whom unemployed Syracusan potters Lampo and Gelon decide will be perfect to mount a pair of plays by the great tragic playwright Euripides. You might have to reread that premise. It’s a pretty whacky one, though some mild trawling of Wikipedia later revealed to me that allegedly some Athenian prisoners in Sicily did buy their freedom by reciting Euripides […]

There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen

The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza

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This was a book club selection for me – while it definitely is the kind of thing I enjoy (hello, Kate Morton novels), this one wouldn’t have been on my radar at all. The novel alternates chapters between Sara, a chef in Philadelphia with a failed restaurant and a failed marriage, and her great-grandmother Serafina, a young mother in early 20th century Sicily (spanning 1908-1925 to be exact). Sara’s beloved great-aunt Rosie has died and part of her last will is to send Sara off […]

“Was there no hope? the tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?”

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

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When Lucrezia, the third daughter of the Duke of Florence, is wed to Alfonso d’Este, she’s not sure what to expect – but whatever it was, it was certainly not that he was going to want her dead before they’d been married a year. I haven’t read Maggie O’Farrell’s work before, but she’s been on my radar after the success of Hamnet, and so when I saw The Marriage Portrait offered as a ‘lucky day’ loan from my library, I snapped it up. Hurrah for […]



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