Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

First Part Setting the Two Main Characters Was Great, Rest of Book Didn’t Work

The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison

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Well not too much to say about this one besides it was ultimately a disappointment. I thought I was going to get into a psychological thriller about tihe ins and outs of a marriage. I think in the end I didn’t like this book because I didn’t have sympathy for “the silent wife” or Jodi. She just passively lets everything happen to her and she lashes out here and there, but not in a big way. And the ending left everything up in the air. […]

You can’t get there from here

Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron

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For the past few years, my husband and I have made a concerted effort to be a family that goes away for week-long summer vacation. So we save up all year and spend the beginning of July in the sleepy Maine beach town my husband grew up going to as a child and teenager. I love it but each time we go I’m struck by how no matter how much we try to explore during each visit we can only scratch the surface of all the […]

Queen, Tangerine, Kind of a Bore

The Chinese Orange Mystery by Ellery Queen

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The Chinese Orange Mystery is the perfect ammunition for people who don’t like mysteries. It goes all-in on all of the most annoying tropes of mystery novels, the ones that drive non-fans nuts. The characters are paper-thin, the dialogue is stilted and almost entirely expository, the plotting is entirely consumed by the puzzle without any consideration of the reality of murder. The detective, Ellery Queen, is an insufferable fop who refuses to ever disclose what he is thinking or who he suspects of the crime. […]

I’m so glad your first historical romance in several years was actually GOOD, Ms. Long!

Lady Derring Takes a Lover by Julie Anne Long

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From Goodreads: A mistress. A mountain of debt. A mysterious wreck of a building. Delilah Swanpool, Countess of Derring, learns the hard way that her husband, “Dear Dull Derring,” is a lot more interesting—and perfidious—dead than alive. It’s a devil of an inheritance, but in the grand ruins of the one building Derring left her, are the seeds of her liberation. And she vows never again to place herself at the mercy of a man. But battle-hardened Captain Tristan Hardy is nothing if not merciless. […]

A disappointing end to a promising series

The Cthulhu Casebooks - Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

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Endings are always difficult. Wrapping up a series based on someone else’s original work, doubly so (a fact all Game of Thrones fans learned the hard way this year). This book concludes Lovegrove’s trilogy of placing Holmes into a Lovecraftian universe and the results are not that great. The fist difficulty is with the source material. Doyle only returned to Holmes reluctantly, and the stories of Holmes towards the end did not have the same energy or enthusiasm as the earlier works. Yes, Lovegrove incorporates […]

Horrors of the Road

Alice Isn't Dead by Joseph Fink

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I heard about Alice Isn’t Dead in a review, I think maybe NPR. It sounded interesting so I picked it up. What I noticed quickly but hadn’t realized at first is that the author, Joseph Fink, is one of the Welcome to Night Vale guys; this tells you a lot about the tone and general type of story to expect if you’re familiar with either the podcast (I am not) or the first novel (which I’ve read). The novel was more openly horror than I […]



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