Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“I was, to him, a competent and required presence. Not a worthless, overbearing spinster or deficient female. Was this how men felt all the time? This intrinsic acceptance of one’s significance? No wonder they walked through life expecting so much as their due.” CBRBINGO – Family

The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin (The Ill-Mannered Ladies, #2) by Alison Goodman

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This one got a bit complicated, but I still had a great time. The plot is going in a direction I definitely did not expect, I hope it gets back to them helping Regency ladies in need after the next book. (I hope there is more than three!) The premise of The Ill-Mannered Ladies books is that because our two main characters, Gus and Julia, have the gift of independent wealth, and the questionable blessing of being constantly overlooked and underestimated due to their genders […]

“The Caravan of life is moving by, Quick! to your places in the passing show.”

Caravan by Dorothy Gilman

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CBR17 Bingo: Culture – Caressa encounters and immerses herself in multiple cultures during her wanderings through the Sahara, including the Tuareg and the Hausa. By the age of sixteen Caressa has been a carnie, a Boston schoolgirl, and the wife of an anthropologist – but in her years in the Sahara desert, she will go on to become a widow, a sorceress, a slave, and much more. The trouble with this book is that the description is rather misleading. There’s a little magic, and a […]

Folktales and cycles through history

Songs for Ghosts by Clara Kumagai

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Songs for Ghosts fulfills the “culture” square on CBR17 Bingo. Songs for Ghosts is a beautiful, tragic story of the power of stories and love, as well as the way past choices can create cycles throughout time. I’m unfamiliar with it, but in the afterword the author talks about Songs for Ghosts being a retelling of Madama Butterfly opera by Puccini where Cio-Cio-San has more agency than just the reductive submissive wife trope. Adam is a seventeen year old whose boyfriend just broke up with […]

“I once thought opportunities were ever arising, but now, older, I realize how thinly the door to destiny opens, how quickly it shuts.”

Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed

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CBR17 Bingo: Arts – Shaherazade is a storyteller, and her weaving and telling of tales is her chief pleasure and weapon throughout the story. When Shaherazade anonymously informs the Malik Shahriyar of his wife’s infidelity, she never imagines the madness – and the murders – to follow. Desperate to save the kingdom and Shahriyar himself, she nominates herself to be his bride, gambling her life on her storytelling. But between the ongoing Crusades and political tensions with neighboring kingdoms, Shaherazade may have bitten off more […]

Get in to Dodge

Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: workplace. The vast majority of the book takes place at the Buffalo Queen saloon. I love reading. And I’m a voracious reader, as my Cannonball Read review catalog can attest to. Maybe I don’t get to it as much as I have in years past but I enjoy reading and documenting what I’ve read. However, because I devour so many books, I tend to have either read or tried most of the stuff I see on listicles. It’s to […]

But where are the crows?

The Puzzle Wood by Rosie Andrews

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(Hello Team, I am posting a review in June!  This is months earlier than I usually do!) I picked this book up on vacation in Edinburgh. The cover has crows on it and it looked good enough. Spoiler – there are no crows in the book at all. Weak sauce. I do not read much mystery at all. The pitch of “governess goes to isolated mansion in woods and things are spoooooooky” seemed like a diverting way to spend much of the flight home.   […]



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