Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Isolated Island Horror

Hemlock Island by Kelley Armstrong

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A standalone horror novel from Kelley Armstrong, Hemlock Island is the story of Laney Kilpatrick who is renting out her (amazingly described) second home.  She’s doing this begrudgingly, she got the house in her divorce but the cost of maintaining her isolated island home, plus maintaining the apartment she shares with her niece, well it’s share your space with strangers, or not have the house on Hemlock Island at all.  However, some of the people renting out the island home have left some … remnants […]

Meet my emotional support Canadian cop turned contract killer

Exit Strategy by Kelley Armstrong

Made to be Broken by Kelley Armstrong

Wild Justice by Kelley Armstrong

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In a recent conversation, someone mentioned that they were revisiting Kelley Armstrong’s Nadia Stafford series because they needed some bananas distraction and a series about a hit woman with a moral code worked. And then I found the first book, Exit Strategy, available in my AudiblePlus catalog. It was perfect. Disconnected enough from reality to be distracting, but not so disconnected that I had to pay attention to deep world building. The narrator of the three books, Jennifer Ikeda, does a great job. Exit Strategy […]

Is The House Haunted?

I'll Be Waiting by Kelley Armstrong

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Or is it the people who are left behind that are the ones being haunted? Let’s break out the Ouija board and get to the bottom of this! Nicola and Anton are determined to savor their limited time together. Having been diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis as a child, Nicola had come to terms with one day leaving her husband behind. But months after their wedding they are in a terrible car accident and it is Anton’s life that is cut short. His last words to […]

A selection of books from the last several months

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry

Hemlock Island by Kelley Armstrong

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I’ve been pretty terrible this year. I haven’t been reading very much, and what little reading I have done hasn’t inspired much writing. So I’m just going to throw these reviews into a box, just to remind myself that I like doing this. Y: The Last Man (Vol. 1) (3 stars) Set in a post-apocalyptic America where all mammals with a Y-chromosome (including sperm and embryos) suddenly and simultaneously die – except for Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. What’s left is a world […]

Spirits and animals of the immortals and two tough girls

Sea of Shadows by Kelley Armstrong

Empire of Night by Kelley Armstrong

Forest of Ruin by Kelley Armstrong

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I can’t remember how I found this trilogy, but I borrowed this first book from my library as an audiobook.  The narrator had an awesome voice and read the story really well.  It’s amazing how a narrator can make a book so much more enjoyable. Anyway, I LOVED this series. We start out visiting a group of prisoners who are being banished / exiled to the forest of the dead.  We’re not really sure what that means, but we know it’s bad.  Ronin is the […]

A collection that’s a little all over the place, but wholly enjoyable

Hex Life by Christopher Golden, Rachel Autumn Deering

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I do not think I am the target reader for a short story. I value stories that have complete resolutions. I want characters that have had the chance to rise and fall, succeed and fail, and sometimes more than once. These things are not always the aim of a short story. I get that, and yet I keep going back to these collections. This is one of the first collections that I have read that are all written by different authors. Though each story centers […]



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