Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I do not believe I could ever be frightened of someone who cannot stir out of doors if his cloak has a wrinkle.”

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett

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4.5 stars Spoiler warning! There will be some spoilers in this review for the first book in the series, so if you’re not caught up, stop what you’re doing and go read Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries immediately. This review will be here when you return. Emily Wilde is back at her university in Cambridge, pleased with the success of her Faerie Encyclopedia. The proposal from her best friend Wendell Bambleby is still something she needs to consider, but after having her suspicions confirmed, that […]

“Me! But nobody likes me best!”

A Vicarage Family by Noel Streatfeid

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CBR14Bingo: Holiday (lots of holidays in this book) Another clearly beloved British children’s classic that I missed as a kid. A Vicarage Family is about (shockingly) a vicar’s family. More specifically it follows Vicky, the stand-in for Streatfeild, as she grows up during the Edwardian era. Isobel is artistic, Louise is pretty, Dick is the baby, and their cousin John is smart, but Vicky is always getting in trouble and doesn’t excel at anything. Her own strong sense of being wronged lead to her constantly […]

The country house party from Hell.

Proper English (England, #0) by K.J. Charles

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This wasn’t nearly as good as Think of England, one of my top five books from 2019, but it was still top quality, as I’ve come to expect from my K.J. Charles books. Proper English is an indirect prequel to Think of England, as it takes place two years earlier than the previous book, and shows how Fen and Pat met (they are together at the time Think of England is grappling with its own disastrous house party). But you really don’t need to read […]

Like Gosford Park, But with More Corset Jokes

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A Quiet Life in the Country (A Lady Hardcastle Mystery, Book 1) By TE Kinsey I think it says something about where my life is that I’m being drawn to speedy little mystery novels right now. As far as these things go, this is a great little mystery book. It starts off with Lady Emily Hardcastle and her Lady’s Maid Flo Armstrong arriving at their new home in a village outside Bristol in 1908. They have moved away from London in search of a “quiet […]

The film was better (at least in my memory)

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Sometime in the first decade of the 20th Century, young Miss Lucy Honeychurch is in Florence with her older, constantly worrying cousin Charlotte Bartlett as companion and chaperone. When they discover that the rooms they’ve been assigned have no nice view, Lucy is disappointed. An older gentleman, Mr. Emerson, offers to trade them, as the rooms he and his son were given have lovely views. “Ladies care about that sort of thing, men do not”. Miss Bartlett is worried about the impropriety of the trade, […]

Anotterchaos #2: Dollars to Duchesses

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Supposedly the book that inspired Julian Fellowes to create the character of Cora, Countess of Grantham, this book explores the late 19th/early 20th century phenomenon of American women taking their fortunes to England to husband-hunt. An interesting, if not riveting, read.



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