Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Lyrical, Soulful, Compelling

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugan

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I’ve been wanting to read Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugan’s Giller prize-winning, Booker prize-shortlisted novel, ever since it came out in 2011- its only taken a “Music” bingo square to finally get me there.  Half-Blood Blues is a beautifully written, deeply layered, and historically fascinating novel about a group of mixed-race jazz musicians in Paris and Berlin during the wild interwar years.  The novel opens in Paris in 1941, when one of the band members gets ‘pinched’ by the occupying Nazis. From this navel, the […]

Not your typical Paris bookstore novel

Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan

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Real book lovers love to read books about bookstores.  Make it a bookstore in Paris and that is even better!  I have read several bookstore in Paris books.  They usually follow a similar plot – confused woman somehow ends up owning a bookstore in Paris and her life changes – typically because of a wild romance with a wonderful Frenchman.  Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan may be about a bookstore in Paris, but the plot is unique. Leah has lost her husband.  That […]

Books, Paris and books about Paris

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

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I am a sucker for books and Paris, and books about Paris, so I had high expectations for this book.  Jean Perdu is the lovelorn owner/operator of the Literary Apothecary, a floating book barge on the Seine from which he prescribes books to heal his customers.  Perdu has been avoiding reading the ‘Dear John/Jean’ letter that his last lover, Manon, sent him when she left 20 years ago. When he does finally open Manon’s letter, he discovers that she had been trying to say a […]

It Started Off Well …

The Collector's Apprentice by B.A. Shapiro

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I have to say, I was rather disappointed with this one.  I really enjoyed Shapiro’s novel The Art Forger – it wasn’t perfect, but it had me hooked, and it was entertaining, and I wanted to see what would happen.  While The Muralist wasn’t as gripping, I also enjoyed it –  of course, a historical fiction novel isn’t going to be quite as much of a page turner as a heist thriller. In this novel, Shapiro tries to merge the two, and it makes for […]

“You’ll probably find one of those, ‘I like art’-type girls”

A Paris All Your Own by Eleanor Brown

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Of all the cities in the world to visit, none is as pressure-filled as Paris (from my vantage point, at least). I’m heading there for a weekend and it’s been a decade since I last went so I picked up this collection of essays, promising “Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light.” I love the concept of this and I have the NYC-equivalents on my TR list (Goodbye to All That & Can’t Say Goodbye). I didn’t necessarily expect a useful travelogue but I […]

I might be getting too old for this kind of thing

Tunnel of Bones by Victoria Schwab

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Cassidy Blake is still following her parents around while they film their show “The Inspecters” (that pun will never stop irritating me), and this time they are in Paris visiting some of the most haunted areas of the city. Cassidy and her ghost buddy Jacob naturally attract the attention of a spirit which causes trouble until figure out how to stop it. Hilarity ensues. I like the premise in that it is real historical ghost history being used for this novel, as it was for […]



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