Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

My new favorite Emily Henry book.

Funny Story by Emily Henry

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“What do we love?” “Your fake relationship,” Ashleigh says. “Well, I don’t,” I say. “Now there’s no good way to get out of it. I mean, when we ‘break up,’ Peter will get to feel smug and superior about that. “That’s no problem,” Miles says, pouring a taste of white wine for each of us. “All we have to do is get married, and then stay together until they split up. And if they have kids, just have one more than them. If they get a dog, we get a […]

“She would build herself a life of plenty. She would force her world to bloom as she’d made the pomegranate tree grow, and Santángel would help her do it. Even if blood watered the soil.”

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

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The Familiar is an atmospheric historical fantasy set in the late 1500s Spain, when the Inquisition was up and running at full power. Our heroine is Luzia Cotado, a scullion in the house of a poor noble family who uses small ancestral magics taught to her by her secretly Jewish family to get through the day: unburning burnt bread, multiplying the potatoes when there wasn’t enough coin at market, heating water, fixing a seam. The plot kicks off when Luzia’s mistress, Doña Valentina, catches her at […]

“God, if she caught feelings, she was going to have to kick her own ass.”

Role Playing by Cathy Yardley

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4.5 stars CBR16 Sweet Books: Cozy 48-year-old Maggie’s son has recently moved away to college and now she’s stuck in the big house she got in the divorce some years earlier, in a town where she barely knows anyone. She’s unapologetically grumpy and doesn’t actually want to expand her social circle. She worries about her son in college, however, and keeps trying to challenge him to socialise and make friends. He turns the table on her and demands that she do the same. She has […]

“Everyone is naked under everything.”

The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review.. Okay, now that I’m sitting down to actually review this book, I can no longer remember why I didn’t bump my 4.5 rating up to 5 . . . so I’m just going to do that right now. There. Fixed. (To be clear, this is still a 4.5 until I can re-read, but it’s living so pleasantly in my mind right now and I’m still laughing about the […]

“I know something no one else in the world knows.”

The Forever Witness by Edward Humes

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As a case on its own this wouldn’t have been as interesting, but combined with the focus on DNA technology and how it’s changing, this really worked for me. The murders of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook in 1987 went unsolved until 2018, when the cold case detective, Jim Scharf, decided to use genetic genealogy on the case, and suddenly within weeks they had a suspect and an arrest. But the suddenness of events in 2018 was based on decades of cold case detecting, […]

My love/hate relationship with this author continues.

House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3) by Sarah J. Maas

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SJM is just bad at endings, is what I’ve decided. I feel the same way about this as I did about Kingdom of Ash. And even though I think it’s the best of her three endings, I also had similar issues with A Court of Wings and Ruin. It’s a pattern, is what I’m saying. I don’t regret reading this book; the first half in particular was a major improvement over the meandering, uninteresting second book. And then she started wrapping things up. Sigh. I’m finding it […]



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