Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Teenage Kicks

The Girls by Emma Cline

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It’s 1969, and 14 year old Evie is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Her parents have divorced and she lives with her early middle aged mother who is out on a self-search quest full of enemas, wheatgrass and horoscopes. Evie underperforms at school and is set to go to boarding school after the summer, and she spends her summer hanging around with her one true friend, whom she dislikes, obsessively reading magazines and following their hammy beauty routines. Evie is obsessed with […]

Cults, Sex, and Vegetarian Recipes

Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat ― An American History by Christina Ward

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I loved this book, which is an odd thing to say because it took me weeks to finish it. It is dense. And the crazy stuff that people called “religion” required more than a few re-reads. On Rosicrucianism Paschal Beverly Randolph saw sex as a powerful energy that could be controlled and sublimated into magical works. As he explored sex magic and the power of the Will, he came to odds with Madame Blavatsky who, as others have testified, tried to kill him with her […]

The Cultish Homecoming

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

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There was a lot going on in the week following my purchase of this book, one I grabbed with great anticipation. So I saved it for the last few days to really savor the experience. Rachel Harrison’s The Return was a sneaky good read; I felt like I was on her storytelling wavelength and that helped overcome the many negative reviews that, I think, missed the point of her book. And now she’s writing a book about returning home to a religious cult? Hell yeah, let’s […]

Amy Larson & Hunter Forrest FBI series

Amy Larson & Hunter Forrest FBI #3 Shadow of Death by Heather Graham

Amy Larson & Hunter Forrest FBI #1 Danger in Numbers by Heather Graham

Amy Larson & Hunter Forrest FBI #2 Crimson Summer by Heather Graham

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I guess I’m back to my old tricks of starting a series at book number three! I don’t know how I do it, but I have a knack for starting at three. Not two, not four, but three. There are many times through the history of my CBRs where I started a series at three. I usually go back and start from one after finishing the third book though! Since this is book three, the duo of Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) agent Amy […]

A basic intro to some famous cults.

Cults: Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them by Max Cutler & Kevin Conley

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 3 Book 5/30 I liked this but it didn’t really deliver what it promised. We do see “inside the world’s most notorious groups” (there were quite a lot of non-American cults in here, which was a pleasant surprise), but I think it is disingenuous of the subtitle to imply that this book tries to understand why people joined these cults, at least in any way beyond the most shallow and obvious (vulnerable people are catnip to cult leaders, who […]

A surprise favorite of 2023!

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

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Thanks to NetGalley and Berkley for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. Okay, but wow. So straight up it’s impossible to talk about this book in any depth without giving out information that should be preserved for the reading experience. As spoiler-free as possible is the best way to go into this one. But generally, and this is as far as the synopsis goes, Vesper Wright left her strict religious community six years before the book starts, when she was almost […]



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