Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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, […]

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, […]

Makes me not want to read any more 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 […]

An epic tale about the hopelessness of being The Other

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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 […]

I don’t think it’s aged all that well (Plus, half Cannonball!)

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I’ve heard James’ The Turn of the Screw as being a classic Gothic novel, the one that basically begat a genre and inspired authors like Shirley Jackson (whose books I’ve loved so far in my readings). I chose this one for the ‘This Old Thing’ bingo square (it was published in 1898), and I was really excited to finally sit down and read it Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The plot is about a young governess who takes a posting that’s too good to be true in an […]

Interesting concept that didn’t quite scare (CBR10 Bingo, Cover art)

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Over the summer, I read several books in the psychological suspense/thriller/unreliable female narrators genre. (Not sure what the actual term for the genre is!) I was trolling through my library’s Overdrive looking for books, and this one piqued my interest initially because I liked the cover art–I’m a big fan of the sort of artistically stylized covers, and also of creepy houses. The blurb also seemed like something I’d like to read: a historical fiction take on the thriller genre. The premise is that new […]



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