Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Don’t Mess With Her

Land of Shadows by Rachel Howzell Hall

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I read a lot of mystery fiction and one of my recurring criticisms is how much I loathe the tough talking’, hard drinkin’, angry-at-the-world male detective. It’s beyond cliche at this point; these folks always act like the world owes them something. What do you have to be so mad about? Anyway, Rachel Howzell Hall’s Elouise Norton could easily fall into this trap but she’s a black woman and that in and of itself is refreshing. She’s witty and not scared and knows how to […]

I’m Just Not That Into Her

Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

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This is try number three with Ottessa Moshfegh’s work and I have to finally admit that she’s not an author suited to my tastes, even as I admire her immense talent for writing. She is great at making the banal interesting and describing the internal monologue of the isolated and potentially manic. Her prose is beautiful. I totally get why people like her. But her characters and stories are so relentlessly uninteresting. I would have never imagined a person with this kind of talent could […]

City of Sisterly Love

Long Bright River by Liz Moore

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Parts of this one hit me hard. I’ve lost multiple high school classmates to drugs/opioids. It’s painful. I don’t even really have the words to express some of the sorrow I’ve felt over lives lost. I never looked at my old neighborhood as a place to escape. I was happy there growing up. But times change. At the heart of the book, this is a story of two sisters who take divergent paths. Those kinds of tales usually aren’t my thing, writers often rely too […]

Kidnappings, murders and snooping around in a high-class brothel

A Murderous Relation by Deanna Raybourn

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This is the fifth book in the Veronica Speedwell series. There will absolutely be spoilers for some of the previous books in the series. Skip this review if you’re not up to date. It’s an excellent series; if you want to start at the beginning, pick up A Curious Beginning.  Official description: Veronica Speedwell and her natural historian colleague Stoker are asked by Lady Wellingtonia Beauclerk to help with a potential scandal so explosive it threatens to rock the monarchy. Prince Albert Victor is a regular visitor to […]

Gone and Forgotten

Have You Seen Me? by Kate White

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Slowly but surely, and of course, unhealthily, we begin to emerge from isolation due to the pandemic. I doubt I’ll be keeping up my book-every-one-or-two-days ratio until the inevitable second wave. So I’m beginning to cast aside the stack of stuff I was going to read to pass the time. This is probably the last one. I got it off one recommendation or another, can’t even remember now where it was. And that seems kind of appropriate because I finished this last night and I’m […]

Not for kids, seriously. Do not mistake this for YA

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

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Official book description: Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of […]



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