Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Hooray for Magical Talking Plants

The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst

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What do you call a bee that’s been put under a spell? Bee-witched! Be kind, you can’t expect a magical talking rose who just woke up from a long enchanted sleep to be instantly ready for a comedy special. In which we get to meet Caz’s mom! Once upon a time a lonely little librarian named Terlu Perna cast a forbidden magic spell to create a friend (Caz the spider plant whose story was told in The Spellshop). Her punishment was to be permanently transformed […]

“People like to believe that there is nothing we do not know. The human body, for instance: people tell themselves that all of its mysteries have already been uncovered….

Not Quite A Ghost by Anne Ursu

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The genome has been mapped. The systems studied. Everything is known. Just like theworld, they tell themselves. The mysteries have all been solved. There is nothing that could possibly lurk beyond what humans can apprehend. They are wrong. When a virus slips its way into a body, sometimes that body reacts in unexpected ways. It marshals all its defenses and attacks; after all, the virus does not mean well—and then, sometimes, even when the intruder is gone, it keeps attacking. It doesn’t even remember why. […]

“Fern wondered if all dramatic showdowns had such an awkward aftermath. It was more painful than a book group pretending they’d read the story.”

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Bradlee

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Fern, the profanity-heavy Rattikin and bookseller first appearing in Bookshops and Bonedust, has run her quiet little shop in her quiet seaside village for years. Now, offered a change of scenery and a potential end to the ennui she’s fallen into in recent years, she transplants herself to the city of Thune to start anew beside a long-absent friend’s coffee shop. What could be a better pairing? (She hates the taste of coffee.) Surely a charming renovation montage will cure what ails her! (Not in […]

“Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands: Book 2 of the Emily Wilde Series: A Novel by Heather Fawcett

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To be honest, it took me three weeks to get through this book. Not that it was overly long (at 341 pages, I don’t consider it a long book), and not that I hated it (though to be honest, I would probably have to work up an emotion to it past “meh” to get towards something like hate), but because my reading of it was completely overshadowed by the fact that Gallifrey, my 17 year old Calico cat, died in the middle of reading it, […]

Witches and Nazis and Ghosts – Oh My

A Resistance of Witches by Morgan Ryan

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The author definitely has potential and I’d be curious to see what else she does but I’d say the novel is a solid 3 – really interesting ideas but there were plot points that could have been fleshed out more to make it stronger. Other themes and plot were very much conventional (mother-daughter conflicts, the old ways vs the new ways, and I don’t think anyone is going to be surprised by the twist) but within that, there are some very emotional and moving scenes. […]

Late to the party, but still treats

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

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I came late to the Carrie Fisher as an author party.  I knew she had written certain ones, forgotten she’d written other ones, but never read anything. Plus, I only had a small inkling of wanting to read anything (mostly right after she passed). But then I found The Princess Diarist. Thinking it was the last memoir she wrote, I figured it was as good as any other to start with. Afterall, why not do the most recent one? It would have the most updated […]



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