Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A ghost story without much story

The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike

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How long would you stay if you suspected your new apartment was haunted? A week? Six months? Two hundred pages? Misao, her husband Teppei, and their small daughter move into a gorgeous new apartment building. The price is suspiciously low, because the building is located right next to a cemetery, temple, and crematorium. Also suspicious: half the new apartments are empty, and the ones that are occupied are rapidly losing their tenants. The first day they move in, the family’s parakeet dies, and the little […]

Read Harder Challenge 2018 Complete! Final Cannonball 10 Review!

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

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Sneaking in with a bit to spare, on a borrowed computer, and one book behind last year’s pace I’m finally posting my last review of Cannonball Read 10. This was the Read Harder 2018 task I was looking least forward to, and I managed to push it off until the last possible moment, but at least I am completing the challenge this year. Task 24 was to “read an assigned book you hated (or never finished)”. In reality I have very few books that I […]

Ghostbusting in Harry Potter-ville

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Full disclosure: I had to read this quickly in one sitting in a coffee shop because I was going to see the author and have her sign it a few hours later. I’d pre-ordered City of Ghosts, but given when it was actually shipped (the day after it was released), I didn’t receive it until Saturday, and the talk/signing was Sunday. Mission was accomplished though, so I guess no harm done. I hadn’t realized this but City of Ghosts is actually V.E./Victoria Schwab’s first middle […]

Harry’s long dark night of the soul.

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See, this is why we need half stars. This book right here. This is not a five star book for me, but I liked it better than four stars, also, and feel weird rating it the same as other books I’ve rated four stars and enjoyed less. It is a perfect encapsulation of the 4.5 star book. So round up or down? Up or down? It is a terrible decision. Don’t read on if you haven’t read through book twelve. Spoilers ahoy. A little bit […]

Perverted Ghosts

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This book is not my usual type, but frankly I am running out of historical m/m by authors I trust and this author was recommended on Goodreads, so I gave this a shot. From the Amazon description: When lonely artist Siôn Ruston retreats to the seaside village of Rosewick Bay, Yorkshire, to recover from a suicide attempt, he doesn’t expect to encounter any ghosts, let alone the one who appears in his bedroom every morning at dawn. He also doesn’t expect to meet his ghost’s […]

Peony in Love

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Peony in Love was, well, more the story of how a girlish obsession could turn into a one-note bit of character development.  Sadly, Peony is a boring young lady, rich and well-bred, and betrothed to a rather mushy-headed young man.  They meet once, never once trading identities (it’s once a night for three nights, actually, but they do so little they could have done it all in one night) and based on that, Peony is In Love.  Her mild obsession with the Chinese opera “The […]



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