Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Hopeful Romance with Community and So Much Good Food

A Match Made in Lipa by Carla de Guzman

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I had to stop reading this a few times to soothe my aching chest. There is an undercurrent of melancholy in Carla de Guzman’s A Match Made in Lipa that gives depth to the sweet and hopeful childhood friends to lovers romance. Kira and Santi played together as children in Lipa until Santi’s grandfather demanded the family move to Manila. Years later, Santi is wandering through Osaka, having just been fired from the family hotel business and cut off from all family money. He runs into […]

A Witchy Romance with Yearning and Restorative Justice

Boss Witch by Ann Aguirre

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I love this and I hope everyone in the coven gets a book. To recap, in Witch, Please we met Danica and Clementine Waterhouse, cousins who share a home in a small Midwestern town and co-own a repair shop called Fix-It Witches. They are witches, from a family of witches and part of a coven. While Danica is reluctantly falling in love with Titus, her magic is spiking, which attracts the attention of a witch hunter. Clem volunteers to distract and divert the witch hunter. […]

Up in the Air

Fly Girl by Ann Hood

The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet by Nell McShane Wulfhart

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I got approved for two books about flight attendants one right after another on NetGalley – so all of you must cope with a themed double post from me. Fly Girl – 3.5 stars Ann Hood became a flight attendant at TWA in 1978 and worked there for many years. In this book, she recounts the places she saw and the people she met, and how the shifting culture of air travel at the time affected her and her job. I do like to travel, […]

She of the Diamante Garters and Pearl-Handled Pistol

The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions by Kelly Greenwood

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In this collection of detective stories, Phryne Fisher recovers missing jewelry and missing people, thwarts blackmailers, and cracks codes, all while remaining as cool and unflappable as ever. I adore the Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. The author wrote a short note at the beginning of the book about how Miss Fisher came to be – she wanted to write a sort of female James Bond, with the glamour and the adventure and the romance, except better than James Bond because her books are not sexist […]

Oh Bluebird, I Wish You had Sung for Me

Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot

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I wish I could articulate why Bluebird didn’t quite work for me. I really wanted to like it, and it has a lot of elements I did enjoy. As a whole, though, it took me a long time to get through the book and left me feeling frustrated. The blurb is great. Lesbian gunslinger fights spies in space! Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back […]

So Who Stole the Gate?

Murder in the Neighborhood by Ellen J Green

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Told through the eyes of Raymond, a young boy, and Freda, his mother, this is the story of Howard Unruh, who on a sunny day in September 1949 committed a mass shooting in his neighborhood and killed thirteen people. Funnily enough I had recently listened to the Last Podcast on the Left series on this crime (which, you will know if you also listen, puts me rather far behind in the archives). The podcast focused more on Unruh – his early life, his military career, […]



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