Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Crossdressing, murder, and blackmail, oh my!

The Body at the Tower (The Agency #2) by Y. S. Lee

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(Note: mild spoilers for Book #1, A Spy in the House.) This has been a fun series to read in the evenings when winding down: the plotting is nicely propulsive, historical London is very well-centered, and Mary Quinn (née Lang) remains an engaging protagonist. This sophomore entry in Lee’s The Agency series picks up about a year after the first book left off: she is now a full member of the all-ladies investigatory firm concealed within Miss Scrimshaw’s School for Girls, and her two superiors […]

The League of Extraordinary Women Strikes Again

A Rogue of One's Own by Evie Dunmore

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Hmm I feel bad giving this the same rating as the prior entry in the series, Bringing Down the Duke, because while similar this book is so very much better. It is, like the first book, at its heart a romance novel but like Serious and Literary, which you can tell because it gets a proper book release and the cover has the cartoon characters as opposed to a realistic drawing. No one is denying that part of it, there are tropes galore (the dowdy one […]

“The tricky thing about giving opinions is that sometimes they cost you more than you wanted to spend.”

The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee

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Jo Kuan and her father figure Old Jin have gotten by pretty well, considering they are Chinese Americans in the deep South of 1890.  Old Jin works as a horse caretaker for a local wealthy family, and Jo has a talent for millinery, so she is hopeful for an apprenticeship at the shop she works.  However, she is abruptly fired one day due to her supposed overly-frank attitude with customers (“You make the customers uncomfortable”).  Old Jin is able to get her a position as […]

A Romance? Historical Fiction? Who Knows?

The Turquoise by Anya Seton

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Through some rabbit hole on the internet, I stumbled across the name Anya Seton and a fancy cover for her book, The Turqouise. Intrigued, I waited patiently for the inter-library loan snail to bring it to me, and boy was I surprised when the book delivered was a battered hardcover bound with actual thread and smelling of an octogenarian’s basement.  While slightly put-off, I accepted it anyway and went home to discover the strange and satisfying pleasure of reading an old book. I ripped my fare share […]

No man here lives a charmed life.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

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Okay, I’m probably operating on far too little sleep to write a coherent review, but here goes. The prose here is a luminous dream, casting it’s shadows upon the mind and lulling the reader into a warm and tranquil languidity. Coming so fast on the heels of the tenaciously awkward writing of Stephanie Meyer, the fluidity exhibited by Conrad is both refreshing in its rarity and a disheartening reminder that I can never be the writer I often dream that I am. This story has […]

My, what big teeth you have.

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

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The inimitable H.G. Wells, from 1895-98, wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. That’s an unbelievable concentration of brilliance that I can’t find in another writer. Someone like Stephen King has written numerous works that will (or have already) become classics of their genre, but they’re spread out over a career (for instance, 1978’s The Stand followed hot on the heels of 1977’s The Shining, but Misery came out in 1987 and The Green Mile […]



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