Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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How far would you go to change history?

11/22/63 by Stephen King

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CBR18 BINGO: Repair, because the main character goes back in time to try to repair the damage caused by JFK’s assassination I had a high-school English teacher who mused that she didn’t think Stephen King would ever be counted among the “classics” because the sheer volume of his output inevitably led to some substandard attempts. Plus, there was the whole tie in with movie deals that undermined his legitimacy (this was back in the ’80s, when it wasn’t necessarily a given that a popular book […]

All this gore and good for her friendship just warmed my lil heart. (The cats helped.)

Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. I was sitting here thinking about how I should rate this, and I just really, really enjoyed myself, so I’m rounding this 4.5 star book up to five. Perhaps it is because there are two cats in here and one of them is a black one, and perhaps it is because of the ending, but regardless, I’m doing it, and I have no regrets. I liked the first […]

Es-ca-pé! I wonder what that means. It’s funny . . . It’s spelled just like the word ‘escape’.

Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Continuing my recent trend of perfect little genre novellas*, Obstetrix was exactly what I was wanting it to be. We follow Liz, a doctor who was recently prosecuted for performing the last abortion in North Dakota (the jury deemed her not guilty). Fresh off being traumatized, she is then kidnapped by a Christian fundamentalist cult to be their OBGYN. *A short novel? It’s just over 200 pages, my cutoff for […]

On the Trail of Murderous Magic

The Helm of Midnight by Marina J. Lostetter

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After the dangerous relic of a serial killer is stolen in a daring heist, Krona and her fellow Regulators must uncover the greater conspiracy at play and recover the mask to keep the murders starting up again from beyond the grave. Not only is this book is an intriguing mix of fantasy, suspense thriller, and horror, but it is also stuffed chock-ful of unique world-building and follows three separate POVs, each with their own storyline. It definitely is a lot, but the author does a […]

Seven people go for a tour in a mysterious library housing a very rare book, and you can probably guess the rest.

The Library After Dark by Ande Pliego

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Hooo, this was a hot mess. The idea of the library was great, but the execution failed. I feel this book’s existence is a symptom of the pressure on genre authors to publish a book a year. It might have been good if given more time to cook. She had a good story in her first book, and now this one is entirely made up of thriller and mystery cliches, all to the tune of overblown figurative language that makes no sense and does not […]

More Murder, Less Family Drama Please

The Heiress by Rachel Hawkins

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Decades after the heiress Ruby McTavish was kidnapped as a toddler and dubiously recovered a year later, her adopted son Camden and his wife Jules return to her ancestral home in a bid to claim her long-neglected inheritance. This book draws inspiration from several cases in the early 20th century in which a kidnapped or vanished child was thought to be returned, only for it to be later discovered that it was instead some unrelated child who for whatever reason was trying to be forced […]



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