Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Steampunk, historical fiction, mystery?

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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I love steampunk and this cover is as steampunk at they get (plus the hardcover one actually has a cutout on the cover that reveals the watch on the inside page which is a really cool design).  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley is a delightful read that defies genres.  The book takes place in Victorian London when the Irish Nationalist movement is terrorizing the city.   Bombings at Scotland yard and Victoria station are being investigated.  Could anybody but a master clockworker have […]

Why not distract yourself from the workings of the world with the workings of your own insides?

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

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…or more frequently, the misfiring insides of others. Fistulated fellows? Check. Elvis and his mega-colon? Check. Taste-testing pet food, pus, rancid oil, and/or the saliva of others? All yours and more to spare! I like to, for the most-part, enjoy nonfiction via audio books. Frequently, I wander around the house doing whatever needs doing while playing books through a speaker. While I whole-heartedly recommend Gulp, I do NOT recommend subjecting innocent bystanders (sorry, husband!) to the dirty work within. Not everything here is gross. And really, […]

Now and Again

Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

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3.5 stars In which giving people the ability to time travel goes as well as you would expect. Alice Payne is a highway-person in 1788, using her girlfriend’s clockwork robot to assist in her robberies.  Meanwhile, Prudence Zuniga is in 1889, trying to stop the first in a series of events that will lead to a War across time and history. It is not going well. Every time she interferes, the events in history play out anyway. She clearly is getting more desperate, and seems […]

A Story I Should Have Learned In History

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

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This is hard to write because there are already so many great Cannonball reviews about this book. So, I will just start by saying – You need to read this book! This story should be taught in every school. I was amazed that I had never heard of the Radium Women, and now I will never forget them. During WWI, women were hired to paint dials on watches using a brilliant new material – paint infused with radium. This paint mixture was lauded for its […]

Just because it’s good doesn’t mean I’m keeping it.

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

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This is the best book I’ve thrown in the resale pile so far. It was good. Very good. So good I debated keeping it. But this is definitely in the “glad I read this once, never putting myself through it again” pile. Sage, our imperfect protagonist of the frame tale, is a reclusive baker who befriends an old man in the grief support group she attends to deal with the loss of her mother. A car accident three years prior has left Sage permanently scarred […]



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