Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Why show when you can just tell?

A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

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Have you seen Mare of Eastown? This is a lot like that. But without coffee from Wawa. And without Jean Smart. And without good writing or realistic characters. If you’ve seen that, no need to read this. Really, no need to read this at all. I had the mystery solved before the first chapter had ended and tortured myself to finish to prove I was right. Chloe Davis is an amazingly brilliant and wonderful young psychologist living in Baton Rouge. We know she is amazingly […]

Not enough development for a really satisfying romance

The Dating Playbook by Farrah Rochon

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The Dating Playbook (2021) by Farrah Rochon is another book I found on NPR’s Best Books List. This one was a romance novel featuring a football player and a fitness trainer. I thought it was all right, but I was a little disappointed. I liked the characters, but both the story and the characters never felt real enough for me to really care about them or their situation. Usually I gobble down romance novels in a day or two, but this one took a couple of weeks […]

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?

Landslide by Susan Conley

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About two thirds of the way through reading Landslide I realized I just didn’t like this book very much, I had a choice – keep going, or just put it in the return to library pile. And I decided to keep going, which speaks well for this book! Not every book is just right for every reader – and that often has nothing to do with the quality of the book. That’s definitely the case here. I think this book is really well written, and I […]

“She was stuck sitting in a wingback chair, her phone as dead as a brick in her hand, and listening to Orchid pepper the townie with questions about how bad the storm had gotten.”

In the Hall with the Knife by Diana Peterfreund

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This book wound up on my to read thanks to a Read Harder Challenge from 2020 – read a mystery where the victim is not a woman – and the fact that I had loved the previous books I had read by Diana Peterfreund, For Darkness Shows the Stars and Across a Star-Swept Sea (as well as their accompanying prequel short stories Among the Nameless Stars and The First Star to Fall). It ended up in my hands thanks to my book exchange gifter, NTE. […]

A juicy gossipy fiction about old Hollywood

Scandal in Babylon by Barbara Hambly

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This book was entertaining.  Set in 1924 in Hollywood, amidst the glitz and glamour of old Tinseltown in it’s glory days, we are plunged into the story fairly quickly.  Emma Blackstone has come to the U.S. to be an assistant of sorts to her famous sister-in-law Kitty Flint, star of the movie being filmed.  Emma lost her husband in the war, and was in need of somewhere to live when Kitty swooped in to help.  Now Emma finds herself on a movie set, keeping an […]

The Trouble with Peace is discontent, greed, and ambition

The Trouble with Peace by Joe Abercrombie

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The Trouble with Peace is the second book in Joe Abercrombie’s “Age of Madness” trilogy.  Here is my review for the first book, A Little Hatred .  Following immediately on the heels of events in the fist book, an uneasy peace has been established.  The Union crushed the rebellion in Valbek and the war in the North was brought to an end.  However, hardly anyone is happy about how things turned out. Despite two hundred hangings, the appetite for workers’ rights has only increased and other […]



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