Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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In My Dreams I Hold A Knife: A Novel by Ashley Winstead

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If you like murder mysteries and want a quick read, this book could fit the bill. I found it hard to put down, even though (maybe because?) the characters are all pretty terrible people. Main character and narrator Jessica Miller is looking forward to her ten year college reunion, but when she returns to Duquette, some old ghosts get stirred up and the unsolved murder of her best friend and roommate will dominate the weekend’s activities. Could one of her friends, the infamous East House […]

The talk is had and the kitties get fed

The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison

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I knew that The Tomb of Dragons was part 3 of a trilogy that was itself kind of a side series from a stand-alone novel The Goblin Emperor. Now all four are being framed as “Within the Chronicles of Osreth” (back cover), so I’m really hoping there’s going to be more of this world and characters. The Tomb of Dragons is a good ending with decent closure for Thara Celehar’s story, but there’s also plenty of room left open for more to come, including the […]

If you like a “I forgot how the hell I got here” book, this one’s pretty good (hahah get it? PRETTY)

The Prettiest One by James Hankins

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I think this might’ve been a random Amazon Kindle find. I can’t quite remember how I got to it. I get books from so many different sources, but I can’t remember anyone recommending this to me, so it was probably Amazon! Our main character Caitlin Sommers wakes up in a parking lot in a car she doesn’t recognize, covered in blood. She has no idea how she got there, where she is, or what she did. She does however remember *who* she is. Caitlin drives […]

Ignore This Siren’s Song

The Siren by Katherine St. John

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In “The Siren,” the handsome, famous, wealthy, charismatic, sexy Cole Powers is shooting a film on a small Caribbean island. The writer-director is Cole’s estranged son, Jackson. And the movie also stars Cole’s ex-wife, the actress Stella Rivers. Along for the ride is producer Taylor Wasserman (also estranged from her father), influencer Madison Kasabian, and Stella’s assistant, the very realistically named Felicity Fox. And half of them want to kill one of the others. I chose this book because although I usually prefer sci-fi and […]

Back to Yale, back to Yale, to prove to dad that I won’t fail (sung in Billy Madison “back to school” tune)

Ninth House (Alex Stern #1) by Leigh Bardugo

Hell Bent (Alex Stern #2) by Leigh Bardugo

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I don’t know you guys are going to believe this, but I made up that title. It’s not a real song. I was just thinking of “Back to Yale”, since this book is set at Yale, and my brain did the rest! As my boss said today, “your words aren’t wordsing”, so we’ll see how this goes! I read Ninth House almost exactly three years ago. I think I even reviewed it here for whatever CBR we were on in January 2023. I really liked […]

“What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.”-Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age by Henry Wiencek

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When  I first read about this book in The NY Times Book Review, I knew I had to have it. Having grown up on a steady diet of  hearing about “Ragtime” and “The Girl on the Velvet Swing”, or how about how Clover Adams’s Memorial was on my mother’s must-see list, any book that covered any and all of that was something I needed to read. Thankfully, this did not disappoint. Stan and Gus covers the working (and potentially sexual) relationship of Standford White and […]



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