Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Magic isn’t real

The Mesmerist by Caroline Woods

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The story: Abby Mendenhall runs the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers in Minneapolis in the 1890s. A new girl, Faith, appears on the doorstep needing a place to stay. Faith doesn’t speak and quickly creeps out some of the other girls with her slightly witchy ways that hint at mesmerism, a sort of hypnotism that was trendy at the time and that didn’t require any words, only actions. Abby has Faith room with May, who is eager to leave the Bethany Home but only if […]

“Stop dreaming about the spires. It was a dreadful place and those were dreadful people, and you and I got caught in their games and paid for it.”

Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles

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If you read The Secret History and hated the characters, and the bleak ending made you feel terrible, this might be the book for you! In her first non-romance, we’ve got K.J. Charles trying her hand (and succeeding) at a historical mystery, dark academia style. It’s 1905, and our main character is Jeremy “Jem” Kite, who has just been fired from his job when a letter accusing him of murder showed up in his employers’ mail. This is not the first or even the tenth such letter […]

A fun read, but possibly too light-hearted

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

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3.5 stars Twenty years before the events in Legends & Lattes, Viv is a young and relatively inexperienced mercenary, who gets badly injured fighting undead monsters while hunting for a powerful necromancer. Her mercenary band leave her in the quiet and mostly empty seaside town of Murk to heal up and recuperate. She worries that the group are going to leave her there, but thankfully, to take her mind off her fears, she encounters the local bookshop owner, who manages to persuade her (Viv has […]

Live, laugh, shed blood

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

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I don’t know about you, but the cover of Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is a bit misleading. Then, after you realize it is not just a cute story of a person planting trees, it becomes down right disturbing!  I now know that the creator, Patrick Horvath is a very odd person (and I might not go onto other things they create) and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou had their hands full doing their part of things. Things are just warped. And I am not the only […]

She’s bad, bad Big Barda! Baddest gal in the whole of Apokolips

Barda by Ngozi Ukazu

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I do not know enough about Barda to understand all the ins and outs of her story. However, you can pick up some of it (the idea she is not the villain Granny Goodness wants, who Granny is, the Furies, etc.), in Ngozi Ukazu’s graphic novel of the same name. Some of the world was lost on me (why is the prisoner Scott Free the way he is? How did he get his name? What about the background he has with another person of Barda’s […]

Lady Sherlock!

A Ruse of Shadows by Sherry Thomas

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You know, I never have any idea what’s going on in these books and I really appreciate that Thomas has taken a very Holmesian approach to each novel–which is to say, they obvious have a very rich mythology at this point (see: the cast of characters at the start of the novel, which you’d usually associate with some terribly long Russian novel) but also they sort of (?) stand alone if you’re willing to be confused and accept that you’re not getting as much nuance. […]



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