Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.”

We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

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I struggled with this book for quite a while. For reasons I now don’t remember I believed this book to be a graphic novel and had filed it as such as a different task for Read Harder challenge than I eventually recorded it under. Then, once I began reading it for what it truly was, I found myself struggling through the chapters. Marin the protagonist is in such a low place, and Nina LaCour writes it so well that I felt myself being pulled under […]

“All the things that make you different make you perfect.”

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

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The Kiss Quotient has been hanging out in my TBR since Malin’s review last July and I was excited to read it this year fulfilling tasks for both Read Harder Challenge and the Reading Women Challenge. I’m glad I read it in the early part of the year and didn’t put it off any longer, it was a quick fun read and while it wasn’t perfectly executed it was certainly better than average and quite good indeed for a debut. I have a soft spot […]

Small but Mighty

The LIttle Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge by HIldegarde H. Swift, Lynd Ward (illustrator)

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Until a few years ago I didn’t know that this book from 1942 existed, and once I did, I still didn’t quite grasp where it was set, which little red lighthouse and great gray bridge it was talking about. How silly I felt when I was flipping through this one after a long day to discover that it is set along the Hudson River and the great gray bridge is the George Washington bridge which I drive over several times a year. In some ways […]

Read Harder Challenge 2018 Complete! Final Cannonball 10 Review!

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

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Sneaking in with a bit to spare, on a borrowed computer, and one book behind last year’s pace I’m finally posting my last review of Cannonball Read 10. This was the Read Harder 2018 task I was looking least forward to, and I managed to push it off until the last possible moment, but at least I am completing the challenge this year. Task 24 was to “read an assigned book you hated (or never finished)”. In reality I have very few books that I […]

There are few things sadder for a reader than a book which lets them down.

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I am so disappointed in this book – I  had high hopes for it but in the end I felt empty. I really wanted to like this one, but the writing bothered me too much. The story is fine, not great but fine. There were a lot of stereotypical plot contrivances along the way. There were several times I rolled my eyes; popular media needs to stop perpetuating lazy stereotypes. So, what is the story about? After hearing  a story how her grandmother fell in […]

Girl, Ghost Best Friend, and Cranky Cat Head to Edinburgh

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I read a bit of YA, but middle grades is not something I usually think to pick up, or even necessarily think of as a distinct genre. But as is often the case in my reading diet of the past few years the Read Harder Challenge had a task that needed sorting. Enter Leedock and her review of City of Ghosts – the perfect book to fulfill the “read the first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series”. Now is when I admit […]



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