Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Maybe I just thought I was a nonviolent person because in my old life, nobody had ever backed me into a corner with a knife to my throat.”

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

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Maggie wakes up one day, cold, naked and soaked to the skin in the gutter of Kair Toren, the sprawling capital city of Rellas, where her favourite fantasy novels are set. For the past decade, Maggie has read and re-read the two books in the unfinished series enough times that she knows the setting, prominent characters and the plot intimately. It’s what makes it possible for her to lie in wait, trying to rob a shady minor character just so she’ll have enough money to […]

Pretty Woman, if the woman is a penniless single mother rather than a leggy L.A call girl

Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan

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4.5 stars Thank you to NetGalley and G.P. Putnam’s Sons for this ARC. My opinions are my own. This book will be out on May 26th. Dolly Brick is a problem solver and has spent most of her life taking care of her family. When her mother left Dolly, her father and her siblings when Dolly was far too young to have to deal with it, she nevertheless ended up basically mothering her younger sister and mentally disabled younger brother. Now she’s a 39-year-old single […]

This was how Trey was going to die, a speck of a man flung from a cardboard box flap like a booger.

Shrunkation by Janine Amesta

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Oh no! Shrunkation awakened my inner nerd. Let me do a quick tldr before I dive into my appreciation for Janine Amesta’s craft. Shrunkation is fun and funny. One of my favorite things in romance is when an author takes a bananas plot and uses it to dive into very real relationship dynamics. This is a marriage in trouble romance in which a desperate attempt at a romantic getaway turns into a desperate attempt to survive. On to the nerdery! This review is a bit […]

Maybe I’m not capable of forgiving and forgetting

Here's Looking At You by Mhairi McFarlane

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After finishing Cover Story by Mhairi McFarlane, I wanted more and started looking through McFarlane’s novels to see if I’d missed any. I was happy to find Looking At You (2014), an older McFarlane novel that I hadn’t read before. Looking At You was fine, but it did feel a little dated and is not on the top of my McFarlane list. Anna Alessi is a history professor in England, forcing herself to go online dating in order to meet the one. She has mostly gotten over a traumatic history of […]

The book that is NSFW and yet somehow I got away with reading it there…..

That Sexy Bea by Owlin

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That Sexy Bear by Lin Visel and Joseph Bergin III (or Owlin) is totally and completely screwed up. And that is being really polite! I really don’t want to go on as it left a funky taste in my mouth. It feels soapy. Why? Because I needed a 10 hour bath after reading with a lot of soap to wash all the parts as the whole experience was creepy AF. OMG there are women’s breasts, and natural who-ha’s hanging out; there are a couple of […]

Romancing the journalist

Cover Story by Mhairi McFarlane

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I’ve read many books by Mhairi McFarlane and really enjoyed most of them. So, when I saw she had a new book out, Cover Story (2025), I knew I was going to read it. McFarlane writes romance-centric novels but with more developed characters and storylines than you sometimes see in your flimsier romances. McFarlane is Scottish and her books take place in England, so there are a lot of Britishisms and other cultural references that sometimes fly over my head. I still enjoy reading them, though. Bel […]



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