Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A powerful sorceress, a tiny man, and some ponies

Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel (editors)

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I’m lucky to live near so many Little Free Libraries. According to the official website, 10 such diminutive lending centers are located in my zip code, and I’m pretty sure there are a few others that aren’t noted. Whenever I walk my neighborhood, I stop at the libraries located along my route and check out whether anything new and interesting has appeared, and occasionally contribute something to the stash. I recently happened upon a couple of Nebula Awards Showcase collections and decided they’d be great […]

Kicking off 2020 with Girl Power!

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy

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I thought I knew a little bit about code breaking and World War II because I was aware of Bletchley Park, Alan Turing, and Enigma. And I was correct, I did know a little about it. Surprisingly (and maybe sadly?), I was unfamiliar with the story of 10,000 American women who served as codebreakers for both the U.S. Army and Navy during World War II. Code Girls tells the remarkable story of the work, lives, and patriotism of these women. I have to confess that […]

This reimagining just doesn’t do justice to the old classic

Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

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Almost every year I’ll take a time-out from holiday mayhem and revisit A Christmas Carol. I was reluctant to review it for CBR, though, because I did that already, back in 2014. So I hit the internet and searched for something Christmas-related that I hadn’t read before and found Mr. Dickens and His Carol on several lists of best Christmas books. Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a fictional account of how Dickens came to write that famous Christmas ghost story. A few details do come […]

Cannonball! I wasn’t prepared for this read

Educated by Tara Westover

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I’ve been hoping that I would read something amazing for my first Cannonball. I had heard so many good things about Educated that I put a hold on it in my library and was excited when I got the call last week, timed perfectly to be read over the long Thanksgiving weekend and become my fifty-second review. Educated is an incredible, thought-provoking memoir. Yet I find myself writing this review quickly not because I’m so eager to share my opinions with other readers, but because I […]

This is (almost) the end

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

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Mary Roach’s Stiff is a paean to dead bodies. She notes in the introduction that “Cadavers are our superheroes: They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from head-on car crashes into walls. You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect. They can be in six places at once. . . .  What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the […]

“She’s not a regular lady”

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart

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Girl Waits with Gun is a charming historical fiction novel based on true events. Amy Stewart sources articles from early 20th century newspapers including the Philadelphia Sun, the Bergen County Evening-Record, and the New York Times, mingles facts with her own imagination, and gives us a sometimes harrowing, often funny suspense tale starring a top-notch heroine. The Kopp sisters are three women living alone on a farm in 1914 New Jersey after the death of their mother. In spite of their brother Francis’s pleas to […]



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