Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Nart

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Nart is an avid romance reader who dabbles in other stuff when she has the spoons. When she’s not reading she’s a bureaucrat both professionally and as an activist because she’s a masochist. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Nart's Quick Questions interview.)

Nart's Reviews:

If you’re curious about power play and BDSM, this is almost a how to manual

Tied Score by Elia Winters

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Second in the Slices of Pie series and stand alone novel with uncommon kink elements. Plot: Iris is an HR manager for a gaming company. She was raised in a strict religious family that broke down due to a pretty ugly divorce that left her with, practically speaking, neither parent in her corner. As an adult, she still rebels against her minister father by being sexually liberated. She rebels against the bounds of official monogamy, which she sees as stifling, by rejecting relationships outright. What’s […]

“Everyone knows high-spirited termagants are the only sorts of ladies I fancy.”

Gentleman Jim by Mimi Matthews

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Classic style regency romance without the problematic bits. Plot: Nicholas and Margaret have been best friends their whole lives and had assumed that they would marry as well. Minor problem: Maggie is the daughter of a wealthy Squire and Nicholas is the son of a retired prostitute now working in the Squire’s home. Other minor problem: her neighbour Frederick is very confident that she will marry him instead, and figures there’s nothing wrong with helping turn the page on this childish infatuation by getting Nicholas […]

“Signore, it is nothing. Women, they always say they will cut off the balls. It is like when the man say ‘Tomorrow, I will respect you still. It means nothing.”

Your Scandalous Ways by Loretta Chase

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It’s Loretta Chase. There’s a pretty solid floor on quality. This woman is the Swiss watch of romance. Plot: Take one James Bond-esque super spy tired of the game, add one famous courtesan that used to be married to a traitor aspiring to become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain and settle back to watch the fireworks. Classic Chase shenanigans ensue. This book has everything. Adventure, state secrets, fist fights on a boat, a heroine with immense sexual experience that she will not apologise […]

Google Translate for failing relationships versus the Uber for break ups

Make Up Break Up by Lily Menon

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This one is really, really going to depend on whether you can relate to the heroine, because the whole story is told from her point of view, and her perspective does not seem super grounded in reality. Plot: Annika has been building up her dating app Make Up. It’s meant to be a sort of AI therapist for couples on the verge of separation, and it has a lot of people very interested and just as many people very anxious because they’ve invested a bunch […]

“If you wanted a thin daughter, you should not have married a man whose female ancestors carried cows home from the pasture.”

Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie

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A relationship that starts with a bet is a really, really hard trick to pull off.  Crusie manages to pull off a non-problematic bet trope, which would have surprised me now, and certainly surprises me with a book published in 2004, or the Decade of Problematic Nonsense With The Added Indignity Of Low Rise Jeans. Plot: Calvin is a small business owner that knows that the only way a small business succeeds is keeping his clients happy. So when one of his client challenges him […]

“Well, you can’t control who your children are, but you can certainly support them, am I right?”

Melissa by Alex Gino

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Are you a parent trying to teach your kid about trans identity? Are you an adult trying to navigate concepts of trans identity that weren’t around when you were a kid? This is a really, really good place to get what I think of as a gut understanding of what it means to live as a trans person, which may be personally relevant, and/or give you a sense of what allyship might look like for these particular friends of the rainbow. Plot: Melissa has to […]



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