Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The forest and the trees

North Woods by Daniel Mason

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I don’t know how to summarize this book – a potpourri of genres (although mostly historical fiction, if you had to pinpoint it), a truly eclectic cast of characters, and incredible prose. The kind of book where you think about the characters after the book is closed, and you puzzle over the last chapter even though he totally stuck the landing (endings are so hard!) Mason somehow describes both the forest and the trees in a very readable and really kinda weird novel. He sharply […]

L’état C’est Lost

The Black Tower by Louis Bayard

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I greatly enjoyed Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye and was excited to pick this one up as well given how effectively he wrote his other historical mystery. And though I liked it a hair less, it did not disappoint. There has always been a curiosity amongst conspiracy theorists wondering what if some historical figures survived death. Hitler in the bunker. The princes in the Tower. And Louis-Charles, the dauphin of France and rightful heir to the throne of his father, Louis XVI. Sadly for him, he […]

I should read more Susanna Kearsley

The King's Messenger by Susanna Kearsley

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StoryGraph Easy Reading Challenge 2025: All Alone – Read a stand-alone book Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for this ARC. My opinions are my own. It is 1613 and Prince Henry, James I’s eldest son and heir has tragically died. Rumours whisper that it might not have been by natural causes. Queen Anna is distraught, and King James is determined to punish the guilty. Andrew Logan is one of the king’s messengers and he’s tasked with going to Scotland to apprehend Sir David Moray, […]

Wives Die Young in Faraday House

The Third Wife of Faraday House by B.R. Myers

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In 1816, Halifax, Nova Scotia (shout out to my hometown!) Emeline Fitzpatrick is a young woman in a pickle.  A scandalous pickle.  She’s fallen in love with a lieutenant in the British Navy, but he hasn’t proposed, and her guardians have set their sights higher for her marriage prospects.  Instead of living her dream of sailing away to Bermuda with her beau, Emeline instead gets caught alone with them, and this results in her getting sent down the South Shore of Nova Scotia to be […]

“Four legs good, two legs bad”

Animal Farm by George Orwell

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Nowhere Books Bingo 25: Banned Book Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Cover featuring an animal On Manor Farm, somewhere in England, an old boar gathers all the animals in the barn and makes a powerful speech about how animals suffer at the hands of humans and should rise up and take power for themselves. Shortly after his death, the animals of Manor Farm do just that – they violently fight back when Farmer Jones and his farmhands try to control them and chase the farmer, his […]

“I must make up my mind which is right – society or I”

Et dukkehjem (A Doll's House) by Henrik Ibsen

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I don’t know if a spoiler warning for a nearly 150-year-old play is necessary – but I will be revealing significant plot points when writing about this historical drama, so if you want to remain unspoiled, go read the play (it’s only three acts, it’s a relatively quick read) or watch a dramatisation, and come back when you’re done. Nora and Torvald Helmer are a middle-class couple living in Christiania (what Oslo was named for a few centuries in the before times) in the late […]



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