Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“A podcaster has decided to ruin my life, so I’m buying a chicken.”

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Listen, when it does the thing it does thing, so I had to round up to five stars because it’s so rare that I truly love a thriller. So many of them sound exactly the same, and have the exact same premise, and don’t really do much interesting beyond trying to shock the hell out of you (which I find uninteresting as the basis for a book). This […]

No Reunions

There Should Have Been Eight by Nalini Singh

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Especially do not attend any reunions that are in memory of a lost friend or are being held in New Zealand.  Between this book, Wellington Paranormal, and Taskmaster NZ I’m starting to be very suspicious of what’s happening on that island. Eight teenagers were the best of friends until everyone’s favorite, Bea, died. Over the next nine years the group has drifted apart but Bea’s sister Darcie has organized a reunion for them at her family’s creepy mansion out in the countryside. It should be […]

Golden Girls with Guns

Killers of a Certain Age: A Novel by Deanna Raybourn

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Back in 2010 a Bruce Willis movie called Red (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) came out. I don’t especially love action movies but this one was great — a comedy action movie with a load of outstanding actors in it, including John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, and Helen Mirren. They all play retired secret agents whom Willis convinces to come out of retirement when he finds himself targeted by mysterious forces. Helen Mirren was my favorite as a bad ass weapons expert who has been running a genteel […]

I Was Looking for the “Better” Promised in the Title but it Kept Getting Worse

For Better and Worse by Margot Hunt

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TW: SA of a child  ( I did not know that going into this book, there are no details concerning it). The premise of this novel sounds very promising.  When Nat and Will date in law school they jokingly discuss getting away with the perfect murder and back as a 3L Nat thinks she could do it. They seem to have it all, good jobs, a beautiful home, a son they both love and dote on, family trips to the beach on Sundays and yet? […]

“The great fish moved silently through the night water”

Jaws by Peter Benchley

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – there is this village on Long Island, and it’s summer 1974, and there’s this shark and it’s killing people. Which is a problem. It’s a problem because a) dead people and b) this coastal village’s livelihood is based on tourism, namely summer tourism and now the tourists could end up as shark food. So, there is a kind of willful ignorance and pretending everything is fine on behalf of village officials because they need that summer […]

“We didn’t call the police right away.”

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

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This book is the “One Book One Community” pick for my local library this year and is the story of a family frantically searching for their missing father, told from the perspective of his 20-year-old daughter, Mia. From the opening sentence, “We didn’t call the police right away” I was gripped with Kim’s novel and Mia’s storytelling. I found this book to be very readable and hard to put down, and specifically catered to my literary and personal interests. First of all, done well I […]



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