Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“Except, in this fairy tale, the maiden has blood on her hands.”

One Dark Window: Book One of the Shepherd King by Rachel Gillig

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“There once was a girl clever and good, who tarried in shadow in the depths of the wood. There also was a king – a shepherd by his crook, who reigned over magic and wrote the old book. The two were together, so the two were the same…The girl, the King…and the monster they became.” Elspeth Spindle, a young, fiery-tempered, average height for a Romantasy heroine, striking beauty with a complicated familial history, lives in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunders (no, I don’t understand […]

Took a wrong turn at Albuquerque

Blackthorn by J.T. Geissinger

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What the actual f*CK did I just read? Ok. As a disclaimer, I received this book at Romchella, a romance readers retreat, as a free ARC from Bramble. They did not ask us to review it at all, let alone influence that review. I thank them for the early access! I’ll keep the spoilers out of it, though I’d dearly love to talk about them, due to the fact this book isn’t even released yet (edit – it is now, but I wrote this before […]

A Spoooky Gothic Romance

The Cruel Dark by Bea Northwick

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You’re promising me some traumatic amnesia, a giant scary estate, and possible ghosts and/or fairy shenanigans? Yes please thank you Bea Northwick! A perfect read for the week before Halloween. Millicent Foxboro is alone in the world. Having overcome a difficult childhood and amnesia that mysteriously erased four years of her life, she now craves stability. When an unexpected job offer arrives with a ridiculously large salary Millicent feels she must take it. She arrives at the once grand but now overgrown estate with its […]

The Hellmouth May/May Not Be Located in Kentucky Thanks to Miner Barons

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

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Let’s get it out of the way for the CBR Bingo this is row 2, column 1: Dwelling. My rating on Storygraph is 3.5 and we don’t have have decimals and fraction ratings here, but this isn’t something I’d rate a 4. In that case, I’m CBR rating it a 3. I tagged Starling House #StrangerThings and I also tagged it #GothicRomance and #MiningCountry and, in sum, that’s how I’d describe the genre and even plot of this book. This is one I wasn’t sure I’d stick […]

Heroine as Victim

Tregaron's Daughter by Madeleine Brent

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When I started reading this, I was surprised how similar the plot was to Madeleine Brent’s (Modesty Blaise writer Peter O’Donnell in reality) first novel, Merlin’s Keep. We have a spunky young lass, a dying father, a benevolent and rich foster father who takes her into his family, and a handsome young man with a checkered past who seems to dislike her but secretly pines for her. Cadi Tregaron from Cornwall is the spunky heroine. She takes care of her father in a small fishing […]

A Gothic romance that could have been better

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling

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[Read as an audiobook from the public library] Sigh. Okay. Y’all, I really, really like Crimson Peak. It’s a weird, sexy, stylish, haunted spun sugar mess of a thing that I will watch any time it’s on. And clearly the author of The Death of Jane Lawrence also likes it. And I do not fault her taste for that. But I feel like she might have some views on the Law of Attraction that we might argue about. Jane Shoringfield is a sensible woman. She […]



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