Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About dreadpiratekel

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Fantasy and horror genre loving Canadian, who is also a library enthusiast, and roommates with a fuzzy freeloader (aka my dog).

dreadpiratekel's Reviews:

Clown Vs Teenagers

There's No Way I'd Die First by Lisa Springer

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What happens when an aspiring teenage movie critic hosts a Halloween party at her isolated mansion home, invites her friends (and some quasi-friends who are teenage influencers), and sets up a fun “game” involving a creepy clown, but the clown turns out to be like – psychotic?  Well, you get There’s No Way I’d Die First by Lisa Springer, where our heroine Noelle gets to prove she has the chops to be a Final Girl, and show there is no way she’d die first. This […]

“And there is nothing more dangerous than a creature who pretends to be one thing and is in truth another.”

Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

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This is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth focused on Lady Macbeth. This version is split into five acts (just like the play!), with Lady Macbeth as a 17-year-old new bride of the title character. Something I found particularly interesting is that the author chose to reflect the various languages spoken in eleventh-century Scotland, so the characters have different versions of their names depending on the language used. In the book, the main character thinks of herself as Roscille, so for the sake of this review, […]

“Your mother thinks ‘The Exorcist’ is a comedy.”

The Night Eaters, Vol. 1: She Eats the Night by Marjorie M. Liu, Sana Takeda

The Night Eaters, Vol. 2: Her Little Reapers by Marjorie M. Liu, Sana Takeda

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Fair warning: this review is about a trilogy, and I’m only reviewing the first two books. The third book is not out yet, and the second book ended in a way that made me go, “No, I need book three now!” The copy of Volume 2 that I have indicates that Volume 3 is coming in fall 2024, but sadly, it is now set to be released in spring 2025. The Night Eaters comes from the same creative team behind the comic series Monstress. I’ve […]

Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through

The Lightning Bottles by Marissa Stapley

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This book is part mystery, part road trip, part behind the music, part reflection on celebrity and how women are treated in the music industry, and also has almost a dash of a fairytale about it.  In the novel’s world, once upon a time (back in the early 1990’s), The Lighting Bottles were on top of the charts, a husband and wife duo, with him coming straight out of the Seattle Scene (she’s from Canada).  But behind the scenes (and this is the behind-the-music part) […]

When Fiction Gets A Little Too Real

Good Girls Don’t Die by Christina Henry

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Good Girls Don’t Die follows three characters—Celia, Allie, and Maggie—who find themselves in strange situations that seem to be the sort of scenarios you would find in novels that the characters happen to be fans of.  Some background around what the characters read is provided at the start of each chapter, via message board-looking posts where book genres are discussed.  The book is split into four parts, with the first three sections following one of the women as she tries to figure out what is […]

Renovation Horrorshow (Or “I don’t deserve to be haunted by cows”)

Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

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Take reality TV ghosthunting, marry it with reality TV home makeover and then write a book about a Production Assistant (PA) working on said show and you get – Haunt Sweet Home!    And if you are me, you get a book that started stressing me out even before we got to the creepier bits. Mara is our lead character and she is sort of adrift. She’s an only child, the youngest cousin in a sprawling family of musicians (except she has no musical talent), […]



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