Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Not All Books about Books are the Same

The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin

The Bookbinder by Pip Williams

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As my semester ended and the break began, I indulged in my usual ritual of checking out lots of books to binge over the holidays.  I hit up both my community college library (which has a stellar YA collection) and my local library. At the library, I ended up grabbing two novels from the New Reads bookshelf that on the surface had a lot in common but ultimately were very different reads. The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin is set during World War […]

Stakes Get Higher and the Empire Gets More Evil

A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir

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I read, An Ember in the Ashes, the first book of Sabaa Tahir’s fantasy series while on vacation in January and it hit all my fantasy sweet spots.  It was nice to know that I had two more books to go before I caught up and had to wait like everybody else for Book 4. A Torch Against the Night picks up right where the first book left off—with Laia and Elias trying to escape the city of Serra through underground tunnels with the goal […]

When There’s Nothing Left to Burn

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

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This was such a delightfully weird novel that I burned through it than less than a day (pun intended.)  I remember an interview with the author on NPR awhile back and liking the premise—a woman is hired to take care of the step-children of a high school friend, whose husband is a senator with aspirations for higher office.  One wrinkle out of many is that the children catch on fire.  Spontaneously combust. They themselves are unharmed but they can easily set fire to anything or […]

Heroes Aren’t Born, They’re Made

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

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There’s nothing better than starting a book that you don’t know much about and don’t have any expectations for, only to discover that it’s really good and that there are two more out there and a final fourth in the works. Last week, I loaded a bunch of library books on my kindle to read on vacation and this one, Ember in the Ashes, caught my eye both because it was the first book in a fantasy series and it was by a woman of color, […]

Travel the World with Nothing But Hand Luggage

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

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This was a perfect beach read even though it was a bit out of my wheelhouse.  I don’t read a lot of romance though CBR-ers have steered me to a couple of books I’ve enjoyed (anything by Lucy Parker for instance).  I don’t mind a bit of sex but I don’t want the plot to be just an excuse to write sex scenes; I want characters and sexy bits to be somewhat balanced but that’s just me. The basic plot is this.  After a near […]

Imagine that you are the type of girl who can cope with it, even if you’re not

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This is another novel I picked up thanks to an Audie Cornish interview with Michael Donkor that I heard on NPR’s All Things Considered while driving home earlier this fall.  I came in right as they were talking about Donkor’s ear for language, and the rhythms of different accents are one of the many things that stood out to me in the novel as well as the interweaving of expressions in Twi, a Ghanaian dialect. It’s a story about relationships—one is between Belinda, a 17-year-old […]



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