Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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What is the truth? **SPOILERS**

Verity by Colleen Hoover

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  This was my first time, and probably last time, reading a Colleen Hoover book. I picked it up since so many people were raving about it, saying that Hoover’s psychological thrillers are much better than her normal fare. Well, I have thoughts about this book and…yeah, they’re mostly negative. This post will have spoilers, don’t read further if you are looking to read this book. Our protagonist is Lowen, a thirty-something single author who just recently lost her mother after a long batter with […]

A Great First (Long) Book in a (Long) Series

City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams

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After carrying this book around from apartment to apartment for thirteen years, I finally made it beyond the first hundred pages and have finished the first book in the quartet. At this pace, I should be done in about 39 more years, so there’s hope! I think this really is a case of a book needing to be read at the right time. With a long train commute and a sudden urge to read Tad Williams, the stars aligned. City of Golden Shadow is set in […]

“I felt that I was now old enough to become fussy and spinsterish if I wanted to:” A Gentle Post-War Comedy of Manners

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

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This is a fast read but it has a lot of depth to it. I enjoyed it and it was the kind of book that surprises you and is counter to what you were expecting, in a good way. Excellent Women was a little outside of my normal reading pattern in that I’m not always a literary fiction type person, but this turned out to be more of a comedy of manners novel than the literary accolades suggested. And it’s good to broaden one’s reading […]

She had been meant to die, yet she’d cut her way out of that fate and back to the world she loved.

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

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With this review, I will finish my 1/4 CBR, so I am feeling very proud right now! I read The Widows of Malabar Hill some time ago – I mentioned sitting by the side of a lake in northern North Dakota in a previous review, and that is where I read this, as well. However, I had read quite a bit by Sujata Massey before – she had a series about a biracial detective, Rei Shimura, which often featured travel to Japan, and had pretty […]

“The planet was beautiful. The planet was horrible. The planet was full of people, and they were beautiful and horrible, too.”

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

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A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, grabbed my attention and did not let go. It was immersive, inclusive, and filled with all sorts of sentient beings with whom I was delighted to spend my time. It was not a book that I would have picked up on my own, but now I find myself barreling head-first further into the series. I was so excited to learn that it was a series; reading is the only way that I comfortably spend any “down time” […]

Boundary-crossing erotica that’s Courtney Milan approved

The Original Sinners - The Red Years #1-4 by Tiffany Reisz

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It’s been a minute since I’ve written a review, and I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do it. Let’s pretend I was never gone and this is actually going to be competent, shall we? So I said right in the title of this review that this is Courtney Milan approved erotica, which is a kind of flippant way of saying she gave it a 5/5 star rating with about a billion caveats. Specifically, I’m referring to this review of The Siren, the first book […]



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