Essie Dubs – Cannonball Read 17

Cozy mystery a la mode

A Deadly Inside Scoop (Ice Cream Parlor Mystery Series, Book 1) by Abby Collette

February 16, 2021 by Essie Dubs Leave a Comment

I really wanted to love this book. I love ice cream! I love cozy mysteries! I especially love cozy mysteries with a cast that isn’t all white women! But alas, I found this book to be more low-fat frozen yogurt than homemade ice cream – close, but not what I was craving. The story follows Bronwyn “Win” Crewse as she takes over her family’s ice cream parlor in the dead of winter in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. The town, a suburb of Cleveland, is built around […]

We’ve met, but I wouldn’t say we’re friends

Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan

February 4, 2021 by Essie Dubs Leave a Comment

J. Courtney Sullivan’s Friends and Strangers follows Elisabeth, a new mom and recent transplant from Brooklyn, NY, to Unspecified College Town, Northeast US, and her nanny Sam, an artist and student at the local women’s college. The novel chronicles a year in the lives of the main characters and a few supporting players as they create drama, cause trauma, and settle into their respective fates. A preponderance of that settling revolves around romantic relationships. Sam aspires to hurry up and settle down, while Elisabeth is […]

The coziest of crime scenes

Yarned and Dangerous (Tangled Web Mystery Book 1) by Sadie Hartwell

January 25, 2021 by Essie Dubs Leave a Comment

My CBR 13 cozy crime (reading) spree continues with Sadie Hartwell’s Yarned and Dangerous, the first book in the Tangled Web Mystery series. Fashion designer Josie Blair temporarily relocates from Brooklyn to Dorset Falls, Connecticut, to care for her great uncle Eb who is recovering from a fatal car crash that killed his wife Cora. Dorset Falls was Josie’s high school home, but it was never her scene, and the reader is introduced to the tiny town through her now-urban eyes: No Starbucks. No nail […]

Not my kind of cozy

Address to Die For (Maggie McDonald Mystery #1) by Mary Feliz

January 19, 2021 by Essie Dubs 4 Comments

The first book in the Maggie McDonald Mystery series by Mary Feliz, Address to Die For, landed in my Kindle via a search for “cozy mystery” on the DC Public Library catalog. I was hoping to find a new series for my pandemic read-fest, and the Maggie McDonald books were well reviewed on both Goodreads and Amazon. The description sounded promisingly cozy, too: Maggie McDonald and her family move into a century-old house they recently inherited, where there’s an old barn out back, plenty of […]

Yes All Women

March 12, 2017 by Essie Dubs 2 Comments

It’s been a long time since a book I’ve read doubled as a personal journal, but my copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me is about as marked up as my high school copy of Emerson/Thoreau’s Nature/Walking. The book, a collection of essays about the individual and shared experiences of womanhood and issues of gender, power, and feminism, takes its name from the lead essay in which Solnit narrates an infuriating experience of an older gentleman oldwhitemansplaining one of her own books to […]

Trudge: The Unmooring of Exposition

January 3, 2017 by Essie Dubs 5 Comments

Greetings CBR! I’m excited to begin my first ever half cannonball with a nod to my New Year’s resolution: to read more nonfiction in 2017. Unfortunately, I started with this disappointing book by one of my longtime favorite personalities, Rachel Maddow. In Drift, Maddow describes the USA’s descent into a near constant state of war. She laments how sharply we’ve deviated from the Jeffersonian ideal to “never keep an unnecessary soldier”, and how in our modern national security state, American civilian life continues largely unaffected […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
Dixie on Track Her Down by Melinda LeighI am just starting Track Her Down and I have read them all in order till now and thought I...
Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

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