Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About xoxoxoe

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I am an artist, blogger, and culture critic. I write about movies, books, television, pop culture—old and new—with a feminine/feminist perspective. sometimes I post pictures of the kid, too. Check out my blog, xoxoxo e, for all of my recent interests, exploits, and opinionated opinions.

xoxoxoe's Reviews:

The Uninvited: Ghosts Like Us

The Uninvited by Dorothy Macardle

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I love old black and white movies, especially mysteries and horror movies. I was watching one of my all-time favorites, The Uninvited, a ghost story starring Ray Milland recently (it’s a really superior film – I highly recommend it if you’ve never seen it) and I started to wonder where the idea for the movie had come from. Was it an original screenplay? A short story? A novel? A quick internet search revealed that the film, directed by English director Lewis Allen was based on […]

Miss Marple Solves It Again (and Again and Again)

Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories by Agatha Christie

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Keeping up my summer tradition of an Agatha Christie re-read I picked up Miss Marple: the Complete Short Stories. Hercule Poirot has always been my favorite Christie sleuth – it must be the Virgo in me that loves his precise mode of detection. I like a few of the Miss Marple novels, but wasn’t as familiar with the short stories. What’s great about Christie is that her books, no matter how intricately plotted, are (like Stephen King’s) character-driven. So, even if you have read them before […]

Not Enough Egypt for Me in This Preposterous Thriller

The Pharaoh Key by Preston & Child

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Whenever I feel the need for some literary comfort food my first instinct is to grab a mystery or crime thriller. I think it’s the combination of thrills with puzzle-solving that appeals to me. The title of this paperback. The Pharaoh Key, jumped out at me because it not only promised a mystery, but it combined another one of my interests, ancient Egypt. I have read some other books by this author team, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, featuring their investigator Agent Prendergast, so I […]

Fire & Blood: Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah…

Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin

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I loved Game of Thrones from its very first episode. I was as shocked as any non-reader of the series at its Psycho-like twist in its penultimate first season episode. As soon as I could I grabbed a copy of the first novel. I read the rest and watched the series rush to its inevitable conclusion. I wasn’t as put off as some folks by plot turns that I felt I had seen coming, or at least had been hinted at as very possible outcomes. […]

Madness, Illness, Grief, and The Haunting of Hill House

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Beware of mild spoilers … I recently finished watching The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. But it is still with me. It was at times an uncomfortable watch, but it also may be one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time. It can’t really be called an adaptation of the immortal Shirley Jackson novel. That classic book could be considered more of a jumping-off point for this, an original, deeply-felt horror story. The original novel, first published in 1959, concerns a […]

And Then There Were Satanists … The Legacy

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The Legacy, by John Coyne, is a mixture of an Agatha Christie whodunnit, as members of a house party are knocked off one by one, and an occult thriller. It’s not always clear how much of the menace is due to dark magic or just plain old greed, as six people have been elected to inherit a legacy — of vast wealth, property, and possibly, supernatural power. Coyne wrote the novel as a tie-in to the successful film starring Katharine Ross and Sam Elliot (and […]



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