Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness.”

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor

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CBR17 Bingo: Play – Amber works as an actress in the Theatre Royal for a section of the book. Also, she’s always playing one role or another to ensnare her latest protector as she works her way up society’s rungs. Amber starts life as the adopted daughter of a farmer, but her beauty and her naked ambition has her destined for greater things – if only she can break free of her love of the unfaithful privateer Bruce. I read on this book’s Wikipedia page (because, […]

Not Enough Beatrice and Benedick, Way Too Much Claudio

Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare

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cbr17bingo – play (spoilers aplenty ahead) I hate Claudio. I feel like that shouldn’t be my takeaway from this play, but here we are. The play centers largely on Claudio and Hero, who early in the play are engaged to be wed. Beatrice and Benedick are the secondary enemies-to-lovers couple, but I can certainly see why some productions of the play choose to emphasize their role because by modern-day standards, the Claudio/Hero relationship is somewhat unpalatable. Claudio is a favorite of the prince Don Pedro, […]

You could write the formula for all the future

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

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CBR 17 BINGO: Play (because you know, theater) My freshman year literature professor told me that you should always read a Shakespeare play through twice to really get to the heart of it. I think that’s a good rule of thumb for any worthwhile literature, and I often think about doing so, except there are too many books in the world to read and right now I’m under time constraints with CBR BINGO. But if I were going to follow her amended advice, Arcadia would […]

“You are the queen. You are the queen that Antoinette wanted to be . . .”

Antoinette's Sister by Diana Giovinazzo

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CBR17 Bingo: Black – Behold, the cover. Though her tragic sister Marie Antoinette is better known today, Maria Carolina Charlotte, the queen of Naples, ruled with better success but faced her own share of troubles and tribulations in her years on the throne. The thing with historical fiction is that the story can live or die by the events it’s based on, especially when it follows the life of a historical figure. Luckily, Charlotte is an interesting main character. Though her attitudes toward the monarchy […]

When in Doubt, Lie Your Tongue Off

Dangerous Obsession by Natasha Peters

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Rhawnie was born in a Romani encampment in Russia, but a murder and an encounter with a man she is fated to follow to the ends of the earth launch her on a path that will see her go halfway across the globe. It took me way too long to realize that Rhawnie is a corruption of the Indian name Rani, which means ‘queen’. This is a nice and long and adventurous bodice ripper of the kind I like perfectly. What sets it apart from […]

“I must make up my mind which is right – society or I”

Et dukkehjem (A Doll's House) by Henrik Ibsen

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I don’t know if a spoiler warning for a nearly 150-year-old play is necessary – but I will be revealing significant plot points when writing about this historical drama, so if you want to remain unspoiled, go read the play (it’s only three acts, it’s a relatively quick read) or watch a dramatisation, and come back when you’re done. Nora and Torvald Helmer are a middle-class couple living in Christiania (what Oslo was named for a few centuries in the before times) in the late […]



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