Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Destined for love: video game developers

Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood

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By this point, I will read any book by Ali Hazelwood, and I’m usually not disappointed. However, she’s so prolific that her books often sneak up on me. As soon as I became aware of its existence, I put Two Can Play (2026) on hold at the library and just recently finished it. Two Can Play feels very much like a Hazelwood romance novel, but it is also shorter than many of her novels–about 200 pages. The story is about two video game developers who work for rival […]

Pining, Second Chances, Plots, and Strategies

Just for the Season by Rachel Griffiths

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tl:dr: I am bumbling around trying not to tell you everything about Just for the Season. It works on many levels. I enjoyed Rachel Griffith’s first book, The Trouble with Anna, but I immediately knew that Charlotte and Wolfgang were going to be the couple I wanted to know more about. Charlotte romps her way through Trouble, while Wolfgang has a rather short, but memorable, cameo. Still, I’ve been reading romance long enough to know when characters are meant for each other. A few years […]

Privateers and puppies

Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti

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Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for this ARC. This book is on sale now. Lady Ruby Ballimore has tried her very best to be the perfect debutante, but no matter how hard she tries, she can’t be quiet and biddable and seemingly empty-headed. After yet another disastrous dinner party, which has shown off her unladylike academic prowess to the Ton and enraged her father, she decides that she needs a change of setting. Ruby’s father is the ambassador to a small European […]

Pow, Right in the Feels

Heart the Lover by Lily King

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Heart the Lover is a new(ish) book from Lily King, published in October of last year. The narrator is a writer, nicknamed “Jordan,” after Gatsby’s Jordan, by two of her classmates. The book follows her relationship with the young men from college through their late-40s. It’s not a long book, only 249 pages, but it definitely packs a punch. I’m a big fan of author Lily King. I think she’s a phenomenal writer and I’ve loved everything I’ve read of hers. That being said, I […]

Could Have Done Better Girl

Private Life by Jane Smiley

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Woman repressed, I’d call this.  By her own self. Margaret Mayfield, oldest daughter of three, begins life in Missouri in the mid1880s, and is considered by herself and her family to not be a good wife prospect.  Too bookish and awkward.  And she is not at all put out by this judgement.  But then Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early shows up (we later learn how manipulated this set-up was by both moms), and she figures, well, I guess so.  He is quite tall and commanding, […]

Cons, Shenanigans, and Poetic Yearning

Scandal of the Summer by Alexandra Vasti

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One of Alexandra Vasti’s frequent archetypes is the very smart woman who doesn’t fit into society. As a woman who frequently looks back in confusion at social interactions gone wrong, I love it. After Miss Ruby Ballimore commits the sin of telling a man he’s wrong in front of other people, she and two friends decide to leave London and hide out at Princess Serafina Di Sangro’s estate in Cornwall. Pomeroy House is already a haven and smuggling headquarters for Captain Malcolm Archer and his […]



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