Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A good trilogy ender.

Enlightened (Enlightenment, #3) by Joanna Chambers

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I was hoping for a real firecracker with this one, just a really undeniably great closer to this lovely trilogy, but what I got was more what I actually should have expected, which was more like the slow burn of a hearth fire. This has been entirely a trilogy about quiet, inner emotions and inner growth, and not melodramatic, shout to the sky emotions. The more I reflect on how this series ended, the more I liked it. David has been recuperating for the last […]

An excellent middle book in this historical romance trilogy.

Beguiled (Enlightenment, #2) by Joanna Chambers

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This series continues to be the perfect blend of historical fiction and romance. Most historical romance authors use the historical setting as a backdrop and creator of atmosphere, or convert it into a sort of fantasy realm to explore other things, which can be really fun! But as I said in my review of the first book in this series, there’s just something so pleasurable about stone cold history being actually explored in this format. In the first book, it was the fallout from a […]

I’m not certain you’d know the right sort of man for you if he arrived on your doorstep riding an elephant.

It's In His Kiss by Julia Quinn

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This book is trickier to conjure an analogous baked good for, but, of course, I’m gonna try. I do think this is more pie than cake, so…if book 7 in the Bridgerton series were a pie, it would be a Little Women filling with a Nancy Drew crust. Odd, yes, but so is our heroine here. The youngest Bridgerton child and last remaining single daughter, Hyacinth, poses a bit of a challenge to marry off for the exhausted Lady Violet. (Poor thing is sooooo close! Six down, two to go, Vi!) […]

Crossdressing, murder, and blackmail, oh my!

The Body at the Tower (The Agency #2) by Y. S. Lee

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(Note: mild spoilers for Book #1, A Spy in the House.) This has been a fun series to read in the evenings when winding down: the plotting is nicely propulsive, historical London is very well-centered, and Mary Quinn (née Lang) remains an engaging protagonist. This sophomore entry in Lee’s The Agency series picks up about a year after the first book left off: she is now a full member of the all-ladies investigatory firm concealed within Miss Scrimshaw’s School for Girls, and her two superiors […]

Sunset Strip

Little Green by Walter Mosley

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One of my all-time favorite movies is Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Featuring Elliot Gould in a great star turn as Phillip Marlowe who is deposited in the 1970s as a fish-out-of-water cynical private eye, Altman does a fantastic job of contrasting the post-war male angst of the 50s with the post-60s hypershift in American culture. And oh yeah, there’s a mystery to solve. Chronologically, there’s no gap between Little Green and Cinnamon Kiss, Mosley’s previous Easy Rawlins book. The former picks up a few months after where the latter […]



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