Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A Very Thriller Retelling of Jane Eyre. Recommended for haters of Mr. Rochester. Fans of Bertha Mason might be disappointed.

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins

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So many 3.5 star books lately, and so hard to decide whether to round up or down. In the end, it was down for this one, because I don’t think, had I not read Jane Eyre, that I would have been very interested in it at all. I think it would have read like just another thriller. But, it was well done, I think. I just have thriller fatigue. And I love Jane Eyre, and while this book shares characters, the characters don’t share motivations, […]

Big, stinky dog living under porch with a suitcase full of $400k and explosives.

The Drifter (Peter Ash, #1) by Nicholas Petrie

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This book was a gift I got from the CBR Book Exchange a couple years ago (thanks again, Jenny S!), and I just never got around to reading it because crime thrillers with hyper-masculine main characters and lots of shoot-’em up violence aren’t really my thing. I’m glad I gave it a shot, because although this book fits comfortably in that genre, I found the lead character Peter Ash, a veteran of the US Marine Corps, to be sensitively portrayed, and the plot itself had […]

Two murders decades apart, and I’m sorry, your character did what now??

What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin

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Settling on 3.5 stars for this one, rounded down. The second half of the book was more engaging/enjoyable for me, as by that point I had started to feel more than irritation for the characters, and the plot unraveling was sort of cool. But it also lost me a little at the end, because one of the main twists/reveals does not make sense! The book follows Kelly Lund, who in 1980 at the age of seventeen was convicted of the murder of famous film director […]

A jury that made the wrong call. OR DID THEY.

The Holdout by Graham Moore

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I must have read this entire book in about four or five hours. I was expecting to spend about three days with it, because my reading has slowed down ever since lockdown/quarantine/whatever started. I can still read, but for less stretches of time, and at a slower pace than normal. Several books I’ve just absolutely crawled through. But not this one! This one broke through for some reason, and I did not want to put it down. (ETA: This was written back in late April […]

Great except for the bits where I wanted to put it in the freezer.

Recursion by Blake Crouch

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Why must Blake Crouch give me all this nightmare fuel? I’m serious, I don’t know why I thought I could get out of this book without my brain being swirled into funnels of terrorized adrenaline. There was little inkling of it in Dark Matter with SPOILERS all of those parallel worlds, and several of them being nuclear wastelands, but that was after the fact. Here, we get it up close and personal and in the moment. Seven times. What the fuck END SPOILERS. I swear, […]

Not at all what I was expecting. #CBRBingo – Birthday

Firestarter by Stephen King

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I’ve read a fair amount of Stephen King by this point, and this is one of the better ones. Aside from some dated language and ideas (fatphobia, gender essentialism, homophobic/racist language used mostly by bad guys), I liked this one almost as much as I like Misery. Good villains, simple but effective story. Just a really well done horror/suspense novel. The 1980s just ooze from every page. I actually wasn’t anticipating the intensity of this novel. It opens in the middle of things, and our […]



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