Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Seven people go for a tour in a mysterious library housing a very rare book, and you can probably guess the rest.

The Library After Dark by Ande Pliego

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Hooo, this was a hot mess. The idea of the library was great, but the execution failed. I feel this book’s existence is a symptom of the pressure on genre authors to publish a book a year. It might have been good if given more time to cook. She had a good story in her first book, and now this one is entirely made up of thriller and mystery cliches, all to the tune of overblown figurative language that makes no sense and does not […]

The Last House on Needless Street Explores the Monster Inside Each of Us

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

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In the boarded up house at the end of Needless Street lives a man named Ted who drinks too much and loses time, a house cat named Olivia who sees it as her job to look after him, and his precocious daughter Lauren who never goes outside – not after what happened last time. Ted’s main hobbies are feeding the myriad songbirds who visit the backyard, and playing all the different games that Lauren makes up. That is, at least, until a murderer arrives on […]

The Serial Killer Book I’ve Been Waiting For

Notes On An Execution by Danya Kukafka

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I went in to this book so wary! I’m not a huge fan of serial killers or the true crime mania that glorifies men who murder (mostly) women. So even though I’d seen glowing review after breathless recommendation of Notes On an Execution, I doubted I’d get past 20%. I am never so pleased to be wrong than when it comes to loving an unexpected book. The premise of this one is simple, it is the day of Ansel Power’s execution. There are brief chapters […]

Angelica! Eliza! ..and Peggy. The Schuyler Sisters!

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The Secret Life of Violet Grant – Reviewed on KatsCannon “I thought, how magical, the first glimpse of snow. By March I would be sick of it, but here in this November instant those tiny flakes swirled with the unspeakable purity of a divine gift.”  About the title of this review – I read this book before I jumped on the Hamilton bandwagon, but when I went to write this and saw Schuyler Sisters as a label on it on Goodreads, I couldn’t resist the […]

Time-traveling serial killer: SOLD.

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I mean. Come on. Just, this author did not have to do any work at all in selling this book to a publisher. And the publisher had no trouble marketing it. Obviously. Time-traveling serial killer sells itself. All this book had to do was show up and it would have been popular, just because we all wanted to read the book about the time-traveling serial killer. Luckily, this book is far from phoned in. It maybe even goes a bit further in the other direction. […]

Riding A Train While Drunk Sounds Awful

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I don’t think I’ve ever met a character who annoyed me more than our protagonist Rachel. That said, I see this as a win for the author, Paula Hawkins because even Rachel seemed tired of dealing with herself.  Fired for months now, our alcoholic friend spends her days riding the train to and from “work” because she doesn’t want her roommate to know that she has been fired. This is pretty much a metaphor for her life–constantly moving but making no progress. The train pauses […]



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