Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I both love and can’t handle mysteries

The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware

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Confession time: I crave spoilers. Crave. Especially in any kind of mystery “oh my god what’s going to happen next” type book I just cannot help myself and I go spoiler-diving. My Google history is full of me looking for spoilers (and my fiance takes my phone when we watch mystery/thriller movies because I am 100% on the film’s Wikipedia page). So yes. I made it about a hundred pages in before I went trolling the internet for spoilers. I found them. Of course I found […]

Great Update to Turn of the Screw

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

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So this is probably my favorite Ruth Ware book that I have read. The other ones were missing key elements or just were not developed enough in my opinion. In “The Turn of the Key” Ware updates “The Turn of the Screw” to contemporary times. Instead of a governess, we have a live in nanny. Instead of two children, we end up having our governess deal with three. And it also takes a while for everything to be revealed. The main reason why I didn’t […]

Please help me. I didn’t kill anyone.

Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

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Here we meet our narrator, sitting in a prison cell in Scotland being implicated in the death of a child in her capacity as a nanny. She is writing a famous defense attorney and overshares her story to create a full context. It’s not a super inventive or super successful narrative convention, but it allows the whole of the novel to take place in a very particular way, in which we as the audience are treated to a slow trickle of essential information as the […]

I needed more of a reason to care what happened to these people

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

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I finished this book on a plane four days ago, and I’m already forgetting it. It was fine – perfect plane fare, and it fit in my purse. But it was tremendously forgettable. Four girls become fast friends at boarding school, something terrible happens, they grow up with a horrible secret, and events come back to haunt them after they’re all grown and living miles away from each other. Not very original, sure, but there’s definitely potential there. Fifteen years after they left school under […]

Chekov’s Clique

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

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Let’s start with the positives.  This was a pleasant enough read, brisk enough. Our protagonist’s point of view as a mother of an infant was beautifully written and the mundane day-to-day joys and frustrations of parenting a six month old were relatable.  I’m paraphrasing badly but the metaphor of an invisible string that connects her to the baby was more poignant than I’m conveying here. I think Ware has an interesting novel about motherhood in her; the relationship between Isa and her baby is the […]

Okay Thriller and Mystery

The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware

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This wasn’t bad, and it wasn’t an exceptional thriller. Very paint by numbers after a while. I think it’s because I figured out what went on and none of the twists were a surprise. I still liked this better than the “Lying Game” though. That was not good. “The Death of Mrs. Westaway” has Harriet (known a Hal) Westaway being told that her grandmother has died, and left her something in her will. The only issue is that Hal knows that Mrs. Westaway can’t be […]



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