Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I can be brave. I can be anything for noodles.”

Deep End by Ali Hazelwood

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4.5 stars Buzzword Title Challenge 25: Water words Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling, both with her academic subjects at Stanford and her diving. While physically fully recovered from a bad accident a year ago, Scarlett has a block that prevents her from even attempting the type of dive that had her hospitalised and having to go through several surgeries to fix her broken body. She needs to get her grades up if she wants to get into med school, and she has reluctantly agreed to go […]

Trudging through Drudgery

The Ritual by Mo Hayder

Magnus by Arjen Lubach

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The Ritual (Mo Hayder) ***½ When it comes to thrillers and crime fiction, I’m stuck in a quandary in the sense that I usually like the idea better than the execution. My main problem is that so many books within the genre seem so badly written: the characters are flat, the prose is hokey and the authors always seem to want to outdo each other by coming up with either the goriest or the most outlandish plots. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but […]

An Emphatic “Meh”

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I picked up Robert Kurson’s latest book Pirate Hunters after really enjoying its predecessor. Shadow Divers was about the discovery of a German submarine that had sunk off the coast of New Jersey. I was hooked on that book, as Kurson talked about the divers’ near death experiences, the eerie feeling of exploring a ship full of the corpses of young enemy combatants, and the research necessary to positively identify the vessel. It was the story of adventure and discovery that kept me enthralled until […]



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