Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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familiar fables

Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue

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Familiar stories are passed, one by one, from one storyteller to another. There are thirteen tales in Kissing the Witch; some will be immediately recognizable, some will require you to dust off your mental library, and some are fantastically new- conjured from collective memory and superstition but new none the less. Each tale is handed off from teller to teller; frequently the perceived villain will be the heroine of the following story. Most are, to quote Emmylou Harris, “full of heartbreak and desire”. She sings that […]

Apparently I Am Not Fond of Phantoms

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

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Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. I tried very hard to get through this book and was very relieved to get to the last page. I didn’t enjoy this at all and thought the melodramatic “Phantom” was awful and the love triangle between him, his love Christine and Christine’s love Raoul was a bit much for me. I have to say the main reason why I gave this 2 stars was that Leroux definitely […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]



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