Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Kicking Ass and Taking Fake Names

Chase Me by Laura Florand

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Relentless, determined, good with knives, and the hero is no slouch either. In this Laura Florand contemporary romance, Chase Me, she proves again why she’s one of my favourite authors by having two badass leads instead of the usual one. Violette Lenoir meets Chase Smith when he breaks into her Michelin two-star restaurant right before she leaves for the night. He’s some kind of former SEAL government operative – though he claims to work in private security –  but she doesn’t know that when she […]

Four Christmas Romance Novellas, No Gifts

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That’s right, I was reading Christmas novellas in October (and reviewing them in November). You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology with contemporary romances by Karina Bliss, Stephanie Doyle, Jennifer Lohmann, and Molly O’Keefe also included a Laura Florand novella called Snow-Kissed which I reviewed separately. The anthology let me try four new-to-me authors and while I’m not sure I’ll be racing out to buy more of their books, in a genre with this much choice and so many writers to wade through, this […]

Convenient Exoticism and a Wedding Night Without Central Heating

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This first book in Mary Balogh’s new Regency romance Westcott series got off to a good start with a great heroine, a play on a familiar romance plot, and a somewhat inscrutable hero. About halfway through, the story lost steam and fell prey to a trope whose day has past. Once again, a toad of an aristocrat has had the temerity to die and leave his estate in disarray as he failed to disclose a rightful heir to his fortune and rendered his own children […]

Okay, sure. Girl, Train, Murder. Fine.

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Okay, first of all, Rachel, the main character, is in her thirties. She’d a woman. She’s a WOMAN on the train. Second of all, uhm, sure, fine, I guess. The girl on the train is an easy read. Not much happens on the pages, the story is pretty straightforward even as Rachel blacks out and forgets large parts of it. But blackouts do not equal nuance. It’s impossible to miss anything. Everything that is lost in black outs or changes in point of view, are […]

Being in one’s body

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Dust Bath Revival is a book in which magic and history and Florida and science all get scrunched up and then smoothed out again into a shape neither the reader nor Hank can anticipate. It’s a dark and fascinating ride. Henrietta Goodness — but for the love of little green apples call her Hank — is not your average heroine. But then, Dust Bath Revival is not your average book; sure, there are zombies but these aren’t your grandfather’s zombies and they aren’t necessarily the […]

Yours, Mine & Ours: Confronting American Racism

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Reviewed with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me I started reading The Fire Next Time in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, reeling from the choice that my fellow Americans made and wondering where it all went wrong. Given my liberal/progressive bent, I was personally devastated and still am, and as the data came rolling in about Trump supporters, I was absolutely disgusted and enraged. Whites, including white women, went for Trump. Christians, including Catholics, went for Trump. And despite the initial assumption […]



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