Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Good buildup, letdown resolution, mediocre characterization

A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh

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Romance and thriller combine in this quick read set in New Zealand. The writing is evocative of its setting; I could imagine the steep cliffs, pounding ocean, and dense forest. However, the characterization was deeply clichéd – tough (but beautiful!) woman with hard past meets tough cop with hard past. Most of the secondary characters were one dimensional. In particular, the missing girl was ecstatically described as beautiful and lively multiple times throughout the novel. In fact, every time she is mentioned, the reader is […]

“We’re all a hundred different things at once. A different person to everyone who knows us.”

The Austen Playbook (London Celebrities #4) by Lucy Parker

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Lucy Parker is an auto buy author for me, one of very few. The stories she is telling in her London Celebrities series use the extravagant backdrops of theatre, television, and movies to tell small scale, human love stories. I am an unabashed fan of Romance books – I am here for the guaranteed happy ending – and Parker is perhaps the most reliable author I’m reading right now. There is a lot of plot packed into this one. We meet Frederica “Freddy” Carlton and […]

Better than my first novel would be

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Lucy Parker’s Act Like It was a big hit with CBR 8.  This one is Parker’s previous book, written under a pseudonym.  It is ok.  It’s really short coming in under 200 pages.  If you liked Act Like It and you have some free time, it’s not a waste to read this one, but I didn’t find it to be a particularly compelling story.  This review is going to sound like a list of complaints (and it kind of is), but I pretty much enjoyed […]

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In 1866, the South Island of New Zealand was the hottest frontier for those who wanted to find their fortunes in the unexplored territories of the Southern Hemisphere. The California gold fields were mostly played out, so Europeans who had missed the opportunities of the fledgling West of America were booking passage to Dunedin, then on to Hokitika for a chance to strike it rich in the newly discovered gold fields. This exotic and diverse world becomes the setting for Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize winning, expansive novel The […]

https://cannonballread.com/2014/10/11923/

Meh

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This novel is not just a stream but rather a flood of consciousness, narrated by a woman who needs the help of mental health professionals. While I appreciate that the narrator reveals her state of mind to us with her endless, run-on rumination, as a reader, I just found it wearying after a while. And in the end, I’m not sure what to make of the odyssey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman, writer for soap operas, unhappily married, trying to lose herself. Elyria has been […]



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