Cannonball Read 11

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Don’t be fooled by the title: there are no dragons in this book

Dragonmeade by Rona Randall

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I don’t think I was in the right mood for this, but I’m trying to get through some of my used-bookstore purchases before I allow myself to buy more. I think now might not be a great time for gothic romances – mostly I wanted to set fire to all the male characters. Even a spunky female heroine is still basically her husband’s property in a gothic/regency/whatever, and just UGH. Our spunky heroine Eustacia grows up with a single mom who runs a gambling parlor out of her home, meaning she gets uninvited to her friends’ birthday parties because her […]

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9/22/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:21 |

How to Fall in Love With a Peacock

The Pride of the Peacock by Victoria Holt

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There are slow burn books and then there is this one where nothing of importance happens for a good 70 percent of the book and then you just have an ineffectual heroine through most of the story who somehow saves herself in the end by talking. Definitely not one of Holt’s best. With a hero that I was rooting against and then the setting moving to Australia, this book just had too much that in the end didn’t work for it. “The Pride of the Peacock” follows Opal Jessica Clavering (known as Jessica) as she slowly unravels her personal history […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

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9/16/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:222 |

A Slight Change in the Formula

The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton

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Over the years, Kate Morton has turned into a must buy for me.  She is a bit of a comfort read – family mysteries uncovered, slightly tragic stories with the potential for hope and better in future generations.  There’s always a twist and turn, but she still manages to surprise and create interesting characters. The Clockmaker’s Daughter is a bit of a break in the norm for her.  While in most ways, it is like her previous novels, it is also more focused on a specific place than the others.  Her other novels were very much about family, with a […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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8/23/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:27 |

“Get it, Fred? I’m holey!”

Black December by Scott Hunter

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DCI Brendan Moran, still recovering from a severe car accident the year before, is called out to a Catholic boarding school named Charnford Abbey, where one of the monks has been murdered (I accidentally typed ‘monkeys’ instead of ‘monks’ here, which would have been better). The abbot and other monks seem strangely uncooperative. Soon, another body is found, unravelling the ancient secrets of the closed order and blah blah blah. The story also includes narcolepsy, a group of cunning Romanian squatters, a long-lost love lost to an IRA car bomb, a formerly brilliant surgeon lost to alcoholism, a famous relic, […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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7/11/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:19 |

How Many Ghosts Does a House Hold?

The Looking-Glass Portrait by Linda Hilton

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Well I do love a good Gothic mystery. Though this is set in contemporary times, Hilton does a great job of evoking the mood of many a Gothic novel. I definitely know that at times I wanted to shake the heroine in this one (Thomasina Ryder known as Tom to her friends and family) because she does some things that must be written down in a Gothic novel that every female character must do. We of course have the warning signs about the love interest, a dark and spooky house, and a mystery that threatens to tear the lovers apart. […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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2/25/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:53 |

Sorely Lacking Keanu Reeves. One Star.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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The year is 1897 and Bram Stoker is a bored businessmen who boosts his income by writing pulpy novels. The most famous of these, simply titled Dracula, was not an immediate hit, but would turn out to define Stoker’s legacy. This isn’t entirely undeserved, but outside of its snug historical pocket the novel doesn’t come across all that well. The story is well-known to nearly everyone, and I was quite surprised at how closely, at first, it follows the 1993 movie. And yet this film, as well as other films before and after it, have chosen to add details or […]

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Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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1/7/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:3 |

Makes me not want to read any more Brontë.

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

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I am sorry to say I did not enjoy this at all. I’m very sure this was well-written, a masterpiece of the English language, etc, etc. But not for me. And there were all these reviews! From people saying it was better than Jane Eyre! What! I don’t get it. At all. George Eliot, were you smoking something when you read this? Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it, but Lucy Snowe < Jane Eyre. I mean, I didn’t even need to have read Jane Eyre to dislike Lucy as a narrator. And apparently this is actually the second […]

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11/8/2018 's CBR10 Review No:135 |

An epic tale about the hopelessness of being The Other

Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley

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[BINGO!] I’ve been mulling over this review of Frankenstein for a couple of weeks now and I have so many thoughts and feelings! I’ll first admit that I had never read Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus before this year, and truly believed that the gothic horror story was just the same as James Whale’s Frankenstein movie. And it is not. At all. The same. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley wrote her epic tale about the hopelessness of being The Other, of the misery of the life unwanted, and uncared for. The monster is a miserable, loveless creature who terrifies anyone who encounters him, and this pushes him to become […]

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10/30/2018 's CBR10 Review No:20 |


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