Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I felt that I was now old enough to become fussy and spinsterish if I wanted to:” A Gentle Post-War Comedy of Manners

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

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This is a fast read but it has a lot of depth to it. I enjoyed it and it was the kind of book that surprises you and is counter to what you were expecting, in a good way. Excellent Women was a little outside of my normal reading pattern in that I’m not always a literary fiction type person, but this turned out to be more of a comedy of manners novel than the literary accolades suggested. And it’s good to broaden one’s reading […]

BINGO! with a bisexual swordsman book from the 1980s. — #CBRBingo

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This little book is not what I was expecting. I’m not sure *what* I was expecting, actually, but it took me a pretty long time to get into this. When I finally did, though, I was glad I pushed through. Not quite sure how to describe this. It’s set in an unnamed city in an unnamed country, where nobles live up on the Hill in the city, and poor people and criminals live in Riverside. Both places have complicated and very strict rules of conduct, […]

Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Emma

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This is the fifth in my series of posts wherein I write reviews for classic books in the form of letters to the characters so as to avoid actually writing a review for a book that has been written about by everyone’s mother’s second cousin’s uncle twice removed from a monkey. I’m re-reading all of Jane Austen’s books in 2016, and it has so far been a fun experience. July was Emma month, and I was very much looking forward to it, since I’ve liked it more and more every time […]

Very silly fun.

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Look, if you’ve made it to book four of this series, you know what you’re in for. Vast quantities of absurd silliness. Lots of naked werewolves (played comedically, of course). Foppish vampires. Alexia being no nonsense and getting herself into all sorts of trouble. A supernatural threat that’s not really a threat, but mostly just an excuse for us to hang out with these characters for four hundred pages. The Parasol Protectorate is not plot heavy. These are hang-out books, and if you happen to […]

Dear Fake Character People: An Open Letter to (most of) the Characters in Pride and Prejudice

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ETA 4/21/16: I messed up when I marked two reviews in a row as #46, so this review actually isn’t my Cannonball. That honor belongs to my dubious review of Captive Prince. Shame on many fronts. The mistake has now been noted on both reviews. This is the third in my series of reviews wherein I get weird and write them in the form of letters to the characters. I’m re-reading all of Jane Austen’s books in 2016, and it shall be glorious. One every two months […]

Tongue-in-cheek steampunk urban fantasy romance, yes please!

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Loved it! Loved it, loved it, loved it. I always get really nervous when I write reviews for books that I have such positive reactions to, especially ones like this one that have such strong personalities. This book knows who it is and what it’s trying to do and does its thing with aplomb. I happened to love it immediately after reading the first sentence, but I can understand how if the humor in the writing or the language she uses, or if you don’t […]



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