Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

You think you know a guy…

Second Hand Curses by Drew Hayes

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Once again, Drew Hayes has come up with something completely different from his previous work.  This has more of a detective story, well, detective vignettes that come together. So kind of like his Fred, The Vampire Accountant set up.  But we’re in the realms of fairy tales this time.  And it feels a lot darker than his other stuff. The writing brings to mind the old noir detective stories, you know, the ones where you see the silhouette of the guy smoking a cigarette and […]

Missed it byyyyy thatmuch

Sweet Fruit, Sour Land by Rebecca Ley

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I know I’ve mentioned a few (hundred) times that I’m a sucker for the Man Booker Prize, and I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of those lists for many years. I’ve finally started paying more attention to others, too, particularly the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Awards and the Women’s Prize, and I also found the cheeky Not-the-Booker Prize awarded by The Guardian from a blend of votes by the public and a judging panel. I thought the 2018 winner, Rebecca Ley’s Sweet Fruit, Sour Land, […]

Murder Mysteries: Hercule Poirot > Miss Marple

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Nemesis by Agatha Christie

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The ingenious website I Write Like has informed me on six separate occasions that my writing most resembles that of Agatha Christie, the best-selling author of all time, aside from Shakespeare and the Bible. Praise be! However, I have never read the First Lady of Mystery, as murders solved by someone other than Sherlock Holmes rarely appeal to me. Fortunately, on last week’s trip to the coast I came across Coalesce Bookstore, a shop packed to the rafters with volumes old and new. I left […]

Still has exciting steampunk aerial combat but doesn’t recapture the joy of the first book

Arabella the Traitor of Mars: The Adventures of Arabella Ashby by David D. Levine

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“The Adventures of Arabella Ashby” series starts off with a bang in Arabella of Mars. The second book, Arabella and the Battle of Venus, was not as ‘romantic and dashing’ as the first.  The third, Arabella the Traitor of Mars, is a good conclusion to Arabella’s story but it doesn’t have the spark of the first book. I mentally groaned when the book started with Arabella and Captain Singh on Earth but then Arabella, once again, needs to race to the other side of the solar system, in as […]

This was just a sad invention/It wasn’t real, I know

Dear Evan Hansen by Val Emmich

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“We start with stars in our eyes/We start believing that we belong/But every sun doesn’t rise/And no one tells you where you went wrong…” Fresh off my obsession with the musical Hamilton, I decided to check out the show Dear Evan Hansen. As I am a poor woman who doesn’t live anywhere near Broadway, I did this by listening to the soundtrack. It’s sad and amazing and so emotional. When I received the Dear Evan Hansen novelization from Pajiba Krampus Exchange, I was excited for […]

Dancing About Architecture is Still Hard

We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix

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Written from the point of view of a down-on-her-luck former guitarist who got kicked out of a heavy metal band on the verge of breaking, We Sold Our Souls follows our protagonist, Kris Pulaski, as she attempts to come to grips with the success of her band’s former lead singer. Compounding the normal issues of self-pity, misogyny and imposter syndrome is a nagging feeling about lost time on the night that they signed their intellectual property contract, removing her, the drummer and the other guitarist […]



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