Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bingo Blackout + Cannonball!

This Will Be Fun: A Novel by E.B. Asher

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Cbr17bingo review — by Finnyfinfinn E.B. Asher is the pen name for the three authors who wrote This Will Be Fun together: Bridget Morrissey, Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka. They are all romance authors, and while there are a couple of lovely romances in this story, it is also an adventure full of bickering and swashbuckling. It’s funny and highly entertaining while dealing with some more serious issues like grief, betrayal and survivor’s guilt. Thanks to Finnyfinfinn for the previous review. In the mythical Queendom […]

‘Tis the Season

Batman The Long Halloween: the Prequel Haunted Knight by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

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I happened to see this at our local library as part of a Halloween Readings display. A long long time ago, I read a whole lotta Batman, including Loeb’s Hush, which I recall thinking was very good. Hush was drawn by the brilliant Jim Lee, which made the reading all the more interesting. There was a time when I read DC graphic novels regularly, but I got kind of tired of it and found other reading more to my liking. While this “prequel” to The […]

Believe the hype

James: A Novel by Percival Everett

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Cbr17bingo TBR (2 bingos) James won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. For some people, “literary fiction,” especially the prize-winning kind, can be intimidating and/or off-putting, but this novel is engaging, exciting and horrifying from page one. James is Percival Everett’s imaging of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his adventure down the Mississippi River, gets separated from him, and is reunited with him again near the end. Everett imagines […]

“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 […]

Not Rebecca, Not Mexican Gothic

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

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I had heard of Isabel Cañas’s The Hacienda as Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, but in Mexico. When I found that it wasn’t literally a Rebecca retelling in Mexico, I put it down because I expected Mrs. Danvers, not priests. This probably says more about me than the book. But I did intend to check it back out when my expectations calmed down. (If I saw all the Mexican Gothic comparisons beforehand, I might have finished it the first time.) This review shouldn’t be about […]

Sometimes a “Hallmark Movie” type of book is just what you need

The Collected Regrets of Clover: A Novel by Mikki Brammer

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Cbr17bingo Rec’d (2 bingos) This book was a staff pick/rec at my local bookstore The Collected Regrets of Clover is a novel about death and grief and about friendship and love. Main character Clover is a 30-something living in New York. She has had a unique connection to death since she was a child, but as an adult she is now struggling with loneliness and grief. A new job and a series of events could potentially take Clover in a direction she has long desired, […]



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