Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

HashtagThrowback

Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper by HIlary Liftin

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Confession, I enjoy celebrity gossip.  Back in the summer of 2012, I was visiting a friend when the news broke about Katie Holmes leaving Tom Cruise. It was such a shocking story at the time and the few details the were publicly available sounded like something out of a spy novel. Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper by Hilary Liftin is a thinly veiled speculative version of the TomKat split. Liftin has a past career of celebrity ghostwriting, which gave certain aspects of her story some […]

A Flying, Glow-in-the-Dark Dinosaur in the Modern Day

Umboi Island by JJ Dupuis

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Laura is the host of Creature X, a cryptozoology show, despite being an avowed skeptic. In search of the Ropen, she and her team go to a remote island in Papua New Guinea, where they become entangled in a mystery when a dead man is found in one of their tents. Though billed a mystery, this is more of a good old-fashioned action-adventure novel, complete with martial arts, gun fights, and a far-off setting. What sets this book above many other old-fashioned action-adventure novel is […]

Return to Sender

Bring me Back by BA Paris

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I love a good detective novel, but one of my main problems within the genre is that so many of these novels would have been over in less than ten pages if the main characters had just had the common sense to call the police, especially because 90% of the main characters in these novels are white middle class men and women. Someone leaves dead animals on your doorstep? Call the police. You receive threatening emails from someone pretending to be your dead relative? Call […]

“The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.”

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

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Even though I’m a big ol’ nerd, I have never been interested in The Wheel of Time series until recently. The new Wheel of Time show on Amazon Prime did it (all hail Rosamund Pike). My family watched it together, and once season one ended I picked up the first book of the very long series. So, I’m coming at this review from the show first and then the books. My review of the show is that it’s not for me. I’m not really sure […]

I Have Seen the Nipple on Your Soul

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

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You know those workdays where you get a lot done in the morning, and you think to yourself, “I’ve done enough, I think I can take it easy this afternoon”? Well, consider that my attitude for the rest of 2022, as my greatest achievement of the year is behind me: I finished this damn book. I’ve wanted to read Haruki Murakami for a long time, and I was so intrigued by the premise of this book: A woman, Aomame, begins to discover subtle differences between […]

Waif Goodbye

Tooth and Nail (Inspector Rebus #3) by Ian Rankin

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London, early 1990s. Women are being attacked on the streets; their throats are slit, they’re stabbed in an unfortunate place and a bite mark is left on their stomachs. The first attack happens on Wolf street and thus the press, with their neverending creativity, dub him the Wolfman. Inspector John Rebus – lapsed Christian, alcoholic in denial, still straddling the line between ‘difficult person’ and ‘asshole’ – is called down to aid the investigation, but by whom? And why?  This is a curiously chaotic novel […]



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