Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Shana Tova, y’all!

Days of Awe: Anthology by Aviva Blakeman, E.S. Wilder

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This cover! It’s gorgeous. I laughed because a good friend of mine has frequently used the anthology’s tagline to describe Jewish holidays to me, “They tried to kill us, we survived. Let’s eat!” As gorgeous as the cover is, the stories inside are fantastic. Aviva Blakeman and E.S. Wilder have put together a fantastic anthology. From the introduction to the end of the last story, Jewish authors have written stories that center Jewish resistance. The stories range from the time of the Spanish inquisition to […]

My friend wrote a book and it’s really good! Why did it take me so long to read it?

Hot Rabbi by Aviva Blakeman

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CBR14 Bingo: Hot (hot features in the title, and a lot of the contents are also decidedly spicy) Official book description: For fifteen years, Shoshana Goldman has avoided her childhood synagogue. Her successful custom-furniture store keeps her busy enough, and the synagogue brings bad memories not peace. It will take nothing short of a minor miracle to change her mind. Intrigued by her friends’ convictions that the new “hot Rabbi” is that minor miracle, Shoshana agrees to attend a service. It’s only one service, right? […]

It was one thing to shtup a willing man on a Friday night at a bar down the mountain, it was another thing entirely to have that man sniffing her vegetables in the produce section of the Campbell Co-op.

Hot Lumberjack by Aviva Blakeman

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Aviva Blakeman’s Hot Lumberjack starts in one of my favorite ways – with a bang. You know immediately that Abi and Ilan are so wildly attracted to each other that during an argument they end up having sex in her car. While Abi is feeling weird about it, she finds out that Ilan’s company is the company clearing trees behind her neighborhood to get the land ready for more development. Which she is also against. And she would very much like not to be woken […]

Something So Strong

Hot Lumberjack by Aviva Blakeman

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Aviva Blakeman’s HOT LUMBERJACK is a fucking delight right off the bat. Literally. This finger scorching follow up to 2020’s HOT RABBI opens with the main characters having an unexpected encounter in a car outside of a bar. They aren’t strangers – they went to Hebrew school together as kids – but they are seeing each other in new ways. One of the things that I most enjoyed (besides the smut, obviously) was Blakeman’s very careful world building. She brings back characters and places from […]

Sexy, Feminist, and Inclusive Romance

Hot Rabbi by Aviva Blakeman

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When I was putting together my Best/Worst list for 2020 I added a note that my reading year was predominantly saved by Romance Twitter and then proceeded to name drop a bunch of books that are sexy, feminist, and inclusive but didn’t quite clear the very high bar to be Top 3. Hot Rabbi is one of those books. I had my eye on Hot Rabbi while it was still in the writing/revising phase – the mood board alone caught my attention in a big […]

Library Romances are Freaking Awesome

Stacked by Aviva Blakeman

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There’s a special joy when your friends write and publish their first book. Last year when Aviva published Stacked and its sequel Say My Name I scooped them up and then in typical me form saved them for when I needed a boost. I should have read this one sooner, if only to join the chorus of positive reviews, but either way I’m glad to have read it now because it was just what I was looking for. (As a note, I’m thanked in the […]



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