Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About Melina

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I have failed every Cannonball Read that I've ever participated in, except my very first one. I am consistent, I'll give myself that much.

Melina's Reviews:

A Plot Within A Plot

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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Imagine being a writing professor at a small community college. Your own novel had meager success but it certainly feels like your chance of fame and fortune are rapidly dwindling.  Enter a young man named Evan.  He doesn’t want or need your help with his writing. He has the best plot, one completely new, one that doesn’t follow a single trope.  You read a few pages and he’s right, it is totally different than anything you’ve ever read, depressingly you wished you had though of the […]

The Craftiest of Pensioners

The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman

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The Bullet That Missed is the 3rd in the series of the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries. I adore the characters and I can never get enough of them working through their difficult cases that often overlap other cases. This one starts as all the others do. The gang gets together to choose a cold case to hopefully solve when Elizabeth also receives word from a mysterious man telling her that she must kill a retired Russian agent who was once her lover or her best […]

Give Me All the Septuagenarians Solving Murders Books, NOW!!

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

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The thing about me is that my entire personality has been pretty much shaped by the 80’s tv shows that I preferred as a child, and those shows were Murder She Wrote and Columbo.  I can be found attempting to chase those highs I felt watching them as a kid (and now in blurry reruns as an adult) by watching the terrible (yet highly watchable) Hallmark Mysteries channel.  The glaring difference though with the murder shows and movies on that channel is that the sleuths […]

Did Something Bad Actually Happen or Is She Just An Addict? *Sigh* I Hate These Books

The House in the Pines: A Novel by Ana Reyes

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Maya is haunted by the death of her best friend years earlier when they were on the cusp of high school graduation and planning their futures.  This is brought to the forefront of her memories when she sees a video on youtube of a woman dying on camera despite not being touched.  Maya knows though, that the man in the video, Frank, (someone she dated for a few weeks at 18)  is responsible for the stranger’s death, just as she knows he was responsible for […]

You Had Me at Braineater

Braineater Jones by Stephen Kozeniewski

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Braineater Jones (as he calls himself), has a problem. He woke up dead in a swimming pool and he has no idea who he was before he was undead. He also doesn’t know why he’s undead and why there are a whole bunch of undead people around these days…these are just some of the many mysteries that our self-described private dick has to tackle. Taking place in the 1930’s this is a fun little play on a noir novel as Jones deals with the “dames”, […]

In a Weird Confluence of Events…I Now Get to Thank Ellesfena!

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Well, well, well…what a surprise! Ellesfena and I got each other in this gift exchange! At first I was completely confused because it’s been 84 years of me being in my house (or at school teaching) and I don’t know what the outside world is like these days.  I am so excited for all three books but particularly Daughter of Smoke & Bone…my son who never reads despite my avid harping on him (that totally works, right?) scuttled away with The Mysterious Benedict Society (don’t […]



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