Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I think I prefer her contemporaries

Manic Pixie Dream Earl by Jenny Holiday

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3.5 stars Thanks to Jenny Holiday, Netgalley and Tantor Audio for this ARC. My opinion is my own. Edward “Effie” Astley, Viscount Featherfinch, is a poet and a terrible disappointment to his father. Thankfully, he’s about to set off on the annual “Earl’s trip” with his two best friends, who support him come what may. So they don’t ask any questions when Effie asks them to help him store a broken printing press, nor why he’s so preoccupied with letters from a Miss Evans. Effie […]

“But for someone in need, she could always find something to spare. —there was always more of herself to give.”

A Fragile Enchantment by Allison Saft

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When magical seamstress Niamh is contracted to make the wedding clothes for a royal wedding, she’s determined to make her name and her fortune. But never in her wildest dreams does she think it’ll lead to political unrest, blackmail, and a romance with the groom – the prince of Avaland. Disclaimer: This book and I may not have been a great match, because the leads are both people-pleasers of the first water, and I am a very self-pleasing person who enjoys saying the word ‘no’ […]

“There’s a difference between someone loving you and agreeing with every single thing you do.”

It's a Love Story by Annabel Monaghan

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3.5 stars Thanks to Netgalley and G.B. Putnam for this ARC. My opinion is my own. Jane Jackson spent her adolescence as the comic relief character “Janey Jakes” on a popular teen sitcom. Now she’s a creative executive at a movie studio, and really trying to get a script she loves turned into a movie. Frequently crippled with anxiety and self esteem issues, Jane has learned to “fake it till you make it”, but she may have faked it too far this time. Desperate to […]

You can’t solve every problem by throwing money at it

Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria

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4.5 stars CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: Diversity   Thank you to Netgalley and Avon for this ARC. My opinions are my own. Ava is nursing her hurt feelings over the dissolution of her marriage in a hotel bar, when a handsome man approaches and offers to make her a better drink than the one she currently has (she made a face when sipping it). The man clearly has bartending experience, and after a brief conversation, Ava discovers that the charming man in fact owns the […]

This was sadly a complete dud

The Love Haters by Katherine Center

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2.5 stars Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and Netgalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. Katie Vaughn is worried about being fired, so she lies about being able to swim, and is persuaded to go to Key West to film a recruitment video about the coast guard. There she meets Tom “Hutch” Hucheson, the seemingly perfect older brother of her co-worker Cole, who has not been informed that his brother has weaselled out of filming the video. Katie is also pretty much […]

“For even to listen to the story of the Trưng Sisters is, in these troubled times, a dangerous act.”

Bronze Drum by Phong Nguyen

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The Trưng sisters, Trắc and Nhi, are as different than each other than sisters can be, but they are united in one thing – their outrage at the treatment of the Viet by the colonizing Han Chinese. When their outrages grow too heavy to bear, they raise an army of women to fight back. It occurred to me while I was reading this book that not only do I know very little about Vietnam past the eponymous war (and even that mostly through the eyes […]



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