Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The Pine Cone (Coven) Society

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

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I accidentally picked up the fat free half & half at the grocery store so I was sorely in need of a cozy comfort read to make up for that tragedy. Librarian Kiela and her trusty assistant Caz firmly believe all books are useful. But when those books are spellbooks rescued from the Great Library in the middle of a revolution in a land where magic is outlawed for the common folk but desperately needed… they are both useful and extremely dangerous. Kiela and Caz […]

“What good is passion without trust?”

Murder By Memory (Dorothy Gentleman, #1) by Olivia Waite

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Another cozy mystery series I actually like! I love that they are going more mainstream, and becoming less formulaic and more creative as the genre expands. This one is set in space! Our main character is Dorothy Gentleman, ship’s detective. She is awoken from a two year “sleep” (characters on this ship have their memories stored in books so when they die they can be reawakened in […]

Happy endings are for grown-ups too

Greenteeth by Molly O'Neill

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I am now convinced that “cozy” basically means there will be tropes generally presented in an entertaining way, and that while drama of various sorts is an option, most all will be well in the end. Basically, happy endings are now allowed in “adult” fiction. Exhibit 1: Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill. I actually picked this up in an airport bookshop (the kind where you can return it within 6 months for a partial refund, but in my case, it was kind of an exchange, so […]

How the legend might have started with books before lattes

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

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What’s cozy in the same way as a latte? Second-hand books. That’s what we get with Bookshops & Bonedust, and I’m down with that. This is a pretty good prequel, but it can be done as a stand-alone, and it also does a nice job of maybe setting up volume 3. The whole story starts with young and eager Viv getting ahead of herself and getting injured in a fight. The rest of her team leaves her behind to recover in middle of nowhere Murk, […]

Part 2 problems but not really that bad

Apprentice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

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Cozy streak incoming. First up: Apprentice to the Villain. This is definitely a part two, in that it’s still a good continuation of the story, but it focuses on developing the big problems to be resolved later. That means there is less character development, and a lot more emphasis on mutual pining, which really gets irritating. The general lack of clear communication causing misunderstandings and problems in romance is a main reason I don’t read a lot of that, because it’s so very avoidable. Do […]

So glad I made it past the late 90s, I would’ve been an embarrassing ghost then.

Grave Expectations by Alice Bell

The Crime Brulee Bake Off by Rebecca Connolly

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You ever just start scrolling down your library’s “available now” page, even though you have eleventy-seventy thousand books in your TBR mountain? Yeah, me too. And that’s how I wandered into two pretty good, but out of my usual genre, cozy-ish mysteries that I came here to recommend. They’re both debut novels, and I read them on audio – They have the same narrator, Sophie Roberts, who did such a great job w/The Crime Brulee Bake Off, and that I clicked her name to see […]



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