Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I couldn’t put it down

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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Many Cannonballers have already reviewed Homegoing, and I doubt I’m going to add any profound insights with my own review. Long story short, I thought this book was amazing. I wish I’d read it much sooner. Homegoing is a family saga, starting with two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, in 18th-century Ghana who don’t know the other exists. Each chapter alternates between their descendants. Effia is married off to a white man from England and lives a fairly luxurious life in a fort, while unbeknownst to her, her […]

The Calm Before the Storm

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

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For two summers the Cazalets – grandparents, three sons and their wives, and their numerous children – gathered in their family country home. Caught up in their domestic dramas, they take little notice of the encroaching threat of war – at first. This is the first of the five Cazalet Chronicles, a series which, drawing upon the experiences of the author and her own family, follows wealthy English family in trade through the turbulent years of World War 2 and its aftermath. Being the first […]

Literary fiction that I actually liked

Flashlight by Susan Choi

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The Book: It’s kind of hard to say what Flashlight is about. The summary makes it sound almost like a mystery: Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach, and hours later, she is found soaking wet and half-drowned, and he is nowhere to be found and presumed drowned. But most of the book is less concerned with this mystery than with the complicated family dynamics at play between the four main characters. Louisa’s father, Serk, is Korean, although he was born in […]

Highwaywomen, Smugglers, Ghosts, and Dukes

Moonstruck Madness by Laurie McBain

Chance The Winds of Fortune by Laurie McBain

Dark Before the Rising Sun by Laurie McBain

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Moonstruck Madness – 4.5 stars (Aug 2022) Sabrina is a lady by day, but by night she rides as a highwayman, trying to keep her family afloat. When she clashes with the Duke of Camareigh, her schemes begin to unravel. There is not as much swashbuckling adventure as you usually get in these old bodice rippers, but that was more than made up for by the genuinely strong-willed heroine and her rather sensible reasons for clashing with the hero. Lucien is rather arrogant though, and […]

“It’s really most remarkable how the human race is so seldom satisfied with what it’s got. Give a man the world and he’s still pining for the moon.”

Penmarric by Susan Howatch

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CBR15 Bingo – Relation”ships”: The many overlapping relationships between the Castallacks and Roslyns, both familial and romantic, drive much of the action of the book forward. When Mark Castallack takes gloomy Penmarric as his home and Janna Roslyn as his wife, he sets a massive family drama into motion. This is one of those sprawling family sagas in which there are a lot of beautiful, dramatic, maladjusted people. The fun of Penmarric though is that it’s also a transposition of the story of Henry II, Eleanor […]

This Family Tree is a Wreath!

Katie Mulholland by Catherine Cookson

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Katie Mulholland, the young scullery maid at a grand house, finds her life thrown into a tailspin when she is assaulted by her employer on the night of his engagement ball. I have an inexplicable love of old mass market paperbacks – especially pulpy books that originally sold for about a dollar that I never heard of before. So when my friend informed me that my local bookstore had an entire subterranean secondhand section, I obviously set off in search of most obscure, yellowing books […]



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