Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Just a lovely, insightful, nostalgic, and kind of sad read.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

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When Earth slows its spinning, haphazardly adding extra minutes to the day , Julia and her family (along with the rest of the world) don’t really notice. Not straight away. But in the weeks and months that follow, Julia’s world will kind of turn upside down. This is partially due to the strangeness of the situation, and also because Julia will soon become a teenager – a turbulent period at the best of times. Decisions need to be made that will allow for some predictability […]

Dream a little dream of me

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

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The first novel of Karen Thompson Walker’s that I read, The Age of Miracles, was a bit of a miss for me. While the story was engaging, Thompson Walker seems to me to have trademarked a clinical way of writing that keeps events and characters at arm’s length from the reader. In her first novel, that just didn’t gel with me and I found it hard to be invested in the story. But, in The Dreamers, Thompson Walker’s detached descriptions hit the right tone, and […]

Fiction Round Up

You Can Thank Me Later by Kelly Harms

The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

The Wedding Party (The Wedding Date #3) by Jasmine Guillory

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(4 stars) You Can Thank Me Later: A Novella by Kelly Harms I’ve found the Audible originals to be hit or miss (Scalzi’s The Dispatcher was probably the only other one I really liked) but they’re free and I like Kelly Harms, so I gave this one a shot. It was pretty good — sort of sappy, sort of cheesy, lots of good descriptions of food. So basically, like a Hallmark movie in an audiobook — which I do not intend to be an insult. […]

The house of cards continued standing.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

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As she did in her second novel “The Dreamers,” Karen Thompson Walker places her characters in the midst of a strange yet believable crisis. Here, for no discernible reason, the rotation of the Earth slows down. The gravitational pull is altered and tides change. Long periods of daylight are followed by long periods of night. Some wildlife begins to die while other types flourish. Plants are no longer able to grow without the aid of artificial light. The plot line reminded me a lot of […]

…how disease sometimes exposes what is otherwise hidden.

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

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This was another book that was displayed by the wise librarians to reel me in. As usual, it worked. Apparently, Karen Thompson Walker is known for her debut novel, Age of Miracles, which appeared on loads of “Best of” lists the year it was published. I will be hunting that book down immediately. The apocalyptic-pandemic trope is a popular one, but Walker does something completely different with it here. A freshman at a small college in California falls asleep and doesn’t wake up. What soon becomes […]

The Dreamers – Wait, What?

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

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A mysterious sleeping sickness hits a small town in California. This is the first act of an apocalyptic novel that doesn’t quite get off the ground, or at least, doesn’t get off the ground in the way I have come to expect from an apocalyptic novel. I couldn’t put this down and read the whole thing in two days because I was excited to see what happened.  I picked it up to begin with because the front cover has praise from Emily St. John Mandel, […]



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