Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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The (No Spoilers) Spoils of Poynton

The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James

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The Spoils of Poynton … should have been a short story rather than a novel. One can (almost) see the whole plot in the first few chapters. The simple set-up is this – Mrs. Gereth has lovingly and carefully collected art and antiques her entire adult married life with her husband. After his death it is discovered that Mr. Gereth has bequeathed the whole kit and caboodle, along with the stately home she has lived in her entire married life, to their only son Owen, […]

Big Trouble in Little Canada

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie

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Ron Currie takes a big swing right at the start of his 2025 novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne. The book begins with a prequel spanning 300 years in the life of the Levesque family, Franco-Americans who settle in Waterville, Maine. For generations, the women of the Levesque line encounter brutality, deprivation and struggle, culminating in the hard-bitten Babs Levesque (Dionne is her married name) who takes a courageous but foolhardy stand in 1968 and pays a horrible price for it. After that, […]

The Stone Sky: “Different choices have always been possible.”

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

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The Stone Sky is the third and last installment in the Broken Earth Trilogy. This book is split between Essun and Nassun in the current day and Hoa in the past, which gives us context for how we got to where we are. We know that Essun and Nassun are on a collision course of sorts – they have the same general goal in mind, but with vastly different outcomes. Regardless, this Season and the Seasons in general cannot continue if humans are to survive. […]

A Handful of Lanterns Are Probably Enough

The House of a Thousand Lanterns by Victoria Holt

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Jane Leslie never dreamt when she first heard of the House of a Thousand Lanterns that she might one day live there, or that it might end up being the death of her. This is another somewhat lackluster Victoria Holt gothic romance rescued by the quality of her writing and the strong main character. I did enjoy also going out to colonial Hong Kong, though you must take the attitudes of most of the characters with a grain of salt in regards to the custom […]

“Hell is a campus.”

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

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What do you do when your graduate advisor dies, but you still need a letter of recommendation? Apparently, you travel to Hell to retrieve his soul and his recommendation along with it. Rivals Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are Cambridge graduate students studying Magick. When a spell gone awry kills their advisor, Professor Grimes, they decide they have no choice but to journey to the underworld to save their academic careers. What follows reads like an homage to Dante’s Inferno, if Dante had been a […]

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: A Novel by Stephen Graham Jones

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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a wild and bloody novel, and I’ve never read anything quite like it. Stephen Graham Jones takes the vampire story into new territory – late 19th and early 20th century Montana, the Western frontier where whites are violently encroaching and native peoples find their communities and their environment subject to horrendous brutality and destruction. What better or more appropriate way to tell American History than through a horror story. The novel begins in contemporary Wyoming where 42-year-old Communications and Journalism […]



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