Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“He is a person, complicated and confused. Just like you.”

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

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Ayesha at Last is a retelling the story of Pride and Prejudice featuring the titular Ayesha, a Muslim woman in her late twenties who has put aside her dreams of poetry and just finished a career change to become a teacher, financed by her wealthy uncle who has been financially supportive of her family since her father’s death including moving them to Canada and giving them the house they share with her grandparents. She is single and being passed on the proverbial marriage mart by […]

Beautiful, harrowing and oh so sad

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

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CBR16 Bingo: Liberate (our protagonists are fighting in World War I to keep the world safe from the Germans) Official plot summary, because I finished this book in early April: It’s 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they’re too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle – an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, […]

Gotta let it burn

So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

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With Cait Corrain back in the news, figured it was really time for me to write this review already! For those less terminally online, our story didn’t start in December but that is when it become a scandal and Booktwitter found out that a debut author scheduled for a 2024 release with some decent positive buzz had been review bombing fellow 2024 YA debuts with fake Goodreads accounts while giving her own book positive reviews (which is one of the reasons it caught the attention […]

I Can Always Rely on Stashed Romance Novels

The Write Escape by Charish Reid

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I read my first Charish Reid novel back in 2020 right before COVID shut everything down for a while. Hearts on Hold has been a book I think of often. In 2021 I read (Trust) Falling for You, but somehow managed to skip Reid in my 2022 reading excursions. Since the books I brought with me for holiday travel were a bit hit and miss (Make You Mine This Christmas and The Holiday Trap were good, the other two books I had with me probably […]

I do not understand why people like this.

A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

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Thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. I am sad to say this will not be a positive review. Firstly, I want to make it clear that the two stars here is specifically for the audio version. I think if I had read the hard copy I would have rounded up to three stars (me eleven months later: or maybe not). I found the narrator to have an exceptionally irritating way of speaking that emphasized […]

“Because love is real, and it happens everywhere. It even happens here.”

For the Love of April French by Penny Aimes

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For the Love of April French is an immensely readable book with a strong authorial voice that is a wonderful fluffy romance playing in the D/s kink realm. It’s the story of April and Dennis who have a temporary no-strings sex agreement, but Dennis is secretly trying to woo April, which is a great trope to build an emotions-first BDSM romance around. Dennis and April are wonderfully flawed and human characters. Aimes writes with her characters humanities front and center. April and Dennis can be […]



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