Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

American heiress and spinster daughter of an earl fall in love in the 1920s.

How to Talk to Nice English Girls by Gretchen Evans

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Another book where I’ve been putting off the review, but this time because I couldn’t work up the energy to talk about it. This was a rec from KJ Charles on Goodreads (she’s a good follow for more eclectic and/or self-pubbed books) and I’m glad I picked it up, but I’m not sure I’ll read any more books by this author. It was solidly in ‘I liked this but meh’ territory. Historical f/f romance is so hard to find, and when I’ve found it, it […]

Radium…the wonder drug. Oh wait, nope.

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This story is the very definition of the word fantastic. It is unbelievable. If you enjoyed (though, enjoyed is a strong work) Devil in the White City or Killers of the Flower Moon, buckle up and prepare to be horrified by more actual American history. In the 1898, we discovered radium. It was great! Just neat-o. It glowed, it was heralded as a wonder drug. WHAT. YES. And, the Radium Girls were the lucky women hired to work in factories that used radium-based paint to […]

Spoiler: white people are unspeakably awful to Native Americans (Not a spoiler)

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Once again, my favorite podcast Literary Disco delivers with an outstanding book recommendation. I hadn’t heard of this book, but thankfully the wait for it was long at my local library. I say thankfully because I am glad that people are becoming familiar with this gruesome and awesome (in the awe-stricken sense of the word) true story that should mar our nations history, if the people of our nation knew anything about it. And if, um, it wasn’t already super thoroughly marred. The Osage Nation, […]

“The girls were wild for dancing, and nothing else. No hearts beat underneath those thin, bright dresses. They laughed like glass.”

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3.5 stars This is a very imaginative and clever re-telling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy-tale set in Prohibition NYC. The princesses are flappers and their father is some kind of business magnate trying to protect his family legacy without a son, the poor man. He keeps them locked up in their large home to protect their virtue and reputation, because that’s a surefire way to earn the obedience of teenagers. Here’s the overview from Goodreads: “Jo, the firstborn, “The General” to her eleven sisters, […]

Girl Detective and Cranky Cat for Hire

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     Since this is books 1 & 2 of a series I may as well review them together. Posie Parker has just set out her shingle as a Private Investigator after coming home from the Ambulance Brigade in WWI. She grew up as the daughter of a country vicar and after losing both her brother and her fiance to the war has decided she has no desire to go back to the small town life. Setting up shop on Grape Street in London with […]

Roaring 20’s urban fantasy

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The first two (and the only ones so far published) books in the Diviners series are genre-bending, spooky young adult mysteries with tons of characters in intersecting stories, all set during the roaring twenties and featuring tons of historical flourishes. I am incredibly lazy and struggling to write reviews right now, so I’m leaning on Goodreads for these plot descriptions: The Diviners (3.5 stars) — “Evie O’Neill has been exiled from her boring old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York […]



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