Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

One of my favorite things about art is how it’s a testament to how much someone was loved, enough that the world needed to see it.

Manila Takes Manhattan by Carla de Guzman

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I was reading a review of a different book and was struck by the reviewer’s complaint about the characters. They felt like the characters were shaped for the plot, rather than the plot shaped by the characters. In contrast, Carla de Guzman drives the action of her story by what her characters would do. In Manila Takes Manhattan, she throws Mon and Olivia into a month of close proximity and the love story feels like it grows organically from there. Mon Mendoza has flown from […]

Joshua Jackson reads Canadian Boyfriend – updated review audiobook edition

Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

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After really enjoying my arc of Jenny Holiday’s Canadian Boyfriend I saw the news that Joshua Jackson would be narrating Mike Martin’s part in the audiobook. And then I saw the arc offer and jumped on it. And now I have mixed feelings about it. I’ll start with what I liked. I liked, really liked, the duet format. I want more of this please. It is imperfect, you could really tell at times that the dialogue was recorded at different times and probably different spaces, but […]

Witnessing History on the Ground

Brave Bird at Wounded Knee by Rachel Bithell

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When the occupation and siege at Wounded Knee hits the news, Patsy’s classmates are annoyed or dismissive, but Patsy is worried for her aunt’s family, who live nearby on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. When I was younger I was completely hooked on those Dear America diaries about girls living through turbulent eras of American history. There was something about getting an average girl’s perspective of historic events that really immersed me in the story. Brave Bird at Wounded Knee follows a similar format, though […]

Biggest K-Pop Stan in the Japanese Underground

The Yakuza's Bias, Volume 1 by Teki Yatsuda

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When the yakuza boss’s daughter drags top lieutenant Ken to a K-Pop concert, he finds himself utterly captivated by the group, especially the main rapper Jun. I only dabble in reading manga, but one genre I have found myself enjoying is light-hearted gag mangas – with one major caveat. The joke’s got to have legs enough for a series, or it will run thin quickly. Luckily, this is not the case with The Yakuza’s Bias. Ken might be a serious, tough-talking yakuza member, but he finds […]

She was pretty sure she wasn’t experiencing cardiac arrest.

How You Get the Girl by Anita Kelly

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I would read Anita Kelly’s grocery list. I loved How You Get the Girl. It’s just…perfect. Julie Parker is coaching a girls high school basketball team, which is fun and rewarding, but she feels adrift and left behind everywhere else in her life. Her twin sibling, London, from Love & Other Disasters, is in a committed relationship and is doing work they love. Her best friend, Ben, from Something Wild & Wonderful, is getting ready to move from Nashville to the Pacific Northwest to live with his love, […]

Is this a romance? I’m saying yes.

This Could be Us by Kennedy Ryan

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“So tell us what happened between Oh, my gosh, my inmate husband has a secret baby and I smashed the man who put him in prison,” Yasmen says, resting her chin on her folded hands. “This is some Days of Our Lives shit.” Kennedy Ryan’s Before I Let Go was one of the best books I read in 2022. I can still call up the big emotions between a divorced couple who are trying to co-parent and run a business together while also trying to […]



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