Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Lust and love

The Song of Aglaia by Anne Simon

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Possibly the most unsettling fairy tale you’ll read all year, The Song of Aglaia is as feminist as it is iconoclastic. Simon’s scritch-scratch textures and kids’-book-gone-awry character designs provide a perfect vehicle for her exploration of the ways lust and — more upsettingly — love destroy our ideals.– “Vulture”      CBR15Passport  Other country (from France) Having had read the Anne Simon trilogy out of order (book three first, now book one The Song of Aglaia) book three makes more sense. In three we see the son […]

Good modern whodunnit

Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths

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Continued my read of all the works of Elly Griffiths with Bleeding Heart Yard.  This book is set in London with three focal characters, DI Harbinder Kaur, DS Cassie Fitzherbert and Anna Vance.  Harbinder is investigating the murder of an MP which occurred at a school reunion; both Cassie and Anna were friends and classmates of the murder victim.  It quickly becomes apparent that there may be a connection to the death of another classmate just when GCSE exams had ended. Griffiths excels at writing […]

A thriller based in gentrification

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole

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When I was reading through the categories for Read Harder 2023 challenge, I was stymied by number 23: Read a social horror, mystery, or thriller novel. I had no idea what a social horror novel was. I had never heard of this genre. I did a quick search for “social horror” and found a few lists. Wouldn’t you know, it turns out I love this genre! The Only Good Indians, Lovecraft Country, Mexican Gothic (which admittedly I loved in concept but not execution) are all […]

Intriguing way to write a fictionalized biography

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

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I listened to this as an audiobook and found it simultaneoulsy sad and uplifting.  In Briefly, A Delicious Life, Nell Stevens sets up a ghost story around the winter that George Sand, Chopin and George’s children and maid spent in an abandoned monastery in Majorca.  In 1838, Sand and company travelled to Majorca under the impression that the winter there would be warm and sunny, just the thing to help Chopin’s failing health.  Things did not go as planned.  That much is documented in Sand’s […]

The mantle of Moth Keeper

The Moth Keeper by K O' Neill

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CBR15Passport Other Country K O’Neill’s graphic novel The Moth Keeper first and foremost has gorgeous illustrations as you usually find in their works.  And it has a terribly sweet story. However, due to lack of text, sometimes things are not as “fleshed out” as they could be, making much open to interpretation for the reader. Yet, if you pay attention to things that do not seem important at first, and take your time reading (not to mention be comfortable and do not have many distractions) […]

Which is worse: colorism and classism or ghosts?

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

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If you search for this book online the first sentence you will read from nearly every review is “Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca” (and now this review maintains that pattern). Truthfully this is the best summary that one can give. Now, I didn’t like Mexican Gothic all that much, but I enjoyed the film version of Rebecca immensely, so I was a little wary of this going in. However, The Hacienda Isabel Cañas is enjoyable. I listened to this book as an audiobook, and the voice cast did a great job. Beatriz […]



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