Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Dangerously in Love

My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

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My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas was a historical romance book club pick from The Ripped Bodice. I sped-read the first half and didn’t return to it last year. And then in February, I remembered, and it was so worth finishing. Ying-Ying, aka Catherine Blade, is a badass. She was trained in martial arts because her guardian/stepfather, Da-Ren, was a Chinese warlord. She makes an enemy of Lin, a dangerous assassin, who relentlessly hunts her across the globe. When the story begins, she is hiding […]

Lady Sherlock!

A Ruse of Shadows by Sherry Thomas

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You know, I never have any idea what’s going on in these books and I really appreciate that Thomas has taken a very Holmesian approach to each novel–which is to say, they obvious have a very rich mythology at this point (see: the cast of characters at the start of the novel, which you’d usually associate with some terribly long Russian novel) but also they sort of (?) stand alone if you’re willing to be confused and accept that you’re not getting as much nuance. […]

Charlotte Holmes is accused of murder

A Ruse of Shadows by Sherry Thomas

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3.5 stars Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: the latest or last book in a series CBR16 Bingo: fan fiction This is book 8 in the series, and really not a good place to begin. Start with A Study in Scarlet Women. Charlotte Holmes, more used to solving murder mysteries, now finds herself questioned by the police, the main suspect in the murder of Lord Bancroft Ashburton. Inspector Threadles is concerned for her, but needn’t have worried, Ms Holmes isn’t going to let something as tiresome as […]

a thousand apologies and what feels like a thousand reviews (through November 2023)

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

Kindred by Octavia E Butler

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Hinumegin er mars by Sólrun Michelsen

Trust by Hernan Diaz

How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't by Ian Dunt

Happy Place by Emily Henry

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It by Owen Jones

In the Beginning was the Sea by Tomás González

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene

Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

The City & the City by China Miéville

A History of Burning by Janika Oza

Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert

Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin

Passion Simple by Annie Ernaux

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Forget Me Not by Julie Soto

Hotel of Secrets by Diana Biller

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

The Late Mrs. Willoughby by Claudia Gray

Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon

A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within by Rory Stewart

Rivals by Katherine McGee

Reign by Katherine McGee

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

The Iliad by Homer, Emily Wilson

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

10 Things that Never Happened by Alexis Hall

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

A Dangerous Kind of Lady by Mia Vincy

A Little Life by Hanya Yanighara

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Nick and Charlie by Alice Oseman

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

The Starting Over Game by girl_with_kaleidoscope_eyes

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Edinburg by Alexander Chee CBR15: Sex True fact, when someone British asked me what I was reading I pronounced this “Edin-BERG” and to their credit they didn’t laugh but instead asked, with some horrified sincerity, if that’s how Americans say it. It’s not! At least, not on purpose. It’s just how can the English language claim to have been invented in a country that seems to not have grasped even a shred of understanding of how the various letters in it work? I digress. This is […]

Three audiobooks narrated excellently by Kate Reading

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss

Miss Moriarty, I Presume? by Sherry Thomas

A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

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The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter – Theodora Goss Rating: 3 stars Mary Jekyll finds herself orphaned and nearly destitute. Most of the servants have to be let go, and she’s sold off most of what’s valuable around the house. She hopes she can get some money by tracking down Edward Hyde, her father’s infamous friend, but instead finds a young woman, Diana, who is apparently Hyde’s daughter. The girl was raised by nuns, with monthly financial support from Mary’s mother. Diana refuses to […]

“We women have been taught since birth that virtue is our greatest asset. I have nothing against virtues—I’d like to think that there are many virtues I practice assiduously. But power does not yield to virtue. Power yields only to power.”

Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock, #5) by Sherry Thomas

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I liked this one, but the mystery plot got convoluted at the end and I had to re-read several bits multiple times, and stop and think about things before it all came together for me. That confusion aside, this also didn’t have as high of emotional stakes for the characters I cared most about. The biggest stakes are for Inspector and Mrs. Treadles, since Inspector Treadles has been accused of two murders. Reasonably, as it turns out, as he was found in a locked room […]



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