Who is Ernie Barnes? Some people might know him from the football field and some might know him from the art galleries. I know him from Between the Lines: How Ernie Barnes Went from the Football field to the Art Gallery by Sandra Neil Wallace (and illustrated by Bryan Collier). Barnes was a young boy growing up in North Carolina. Shy, not good with words and a love of art set him apart at an early age. However, he was unable to partake in the […]
Don’t call it a Cannonball (but it is)
So this is my 2nd full Cannonball. I did a half in CBR 7, and finished my review for my 52nd book for CBR8 on New Year’s Eve. I’m not sure what happened this year, but I’m super early with my 52nd book! Anyway, my final book last year was suggested by my niece, and it was a meaningful book (The BFG), so I wanted my Cannonball book to be a meaningful one this year. I was in the middle of a few books, and […]
I Kind of Just Feel Nothing with this One
There’s a café in our city with a little “library” that encourages visitors to swap books (leave one, take one), and I’m pretty sure at the moment they have about 4 full sets of all the Twilight series? In any case, on Canada Day, I impulsively did a switcheroo, and got my friend to point at a random book for me to take, which led me to picking up Pop by Gordon Korman. Well, initially it was something like “Vampie Lovers 2” or whatever but I said, I can’t […]
A quarterback and a photographer try to be friends, end up as lovers
First of all, I want to warn my fellow romance readers that there are a LOT of distracting typos in this book. Normally, while I’m a complete grammar nazi in my daily life(comes with being a language teacher, I suspect), I am nonetheless usually able to ignore the occasional typo in my romances, mainly because I don’t tend to read them all THAT closely. But in this book, there were enough that it bothered even me and took me out of the story on occasion. […]
Mediocre Sports Romance
This book is not a ‘good’ book, but it’s one I enjoyed. It’s biggest downfall is lack of editing. It runs nearly 700 pages and she repeatedly misuses the word ‘passed’ for ‘past’. No, seriously, I’m not sure what was wrong with me when reading this. Misusing words like that would normally be a complete dealbreaker for me, and yet, here we are. I actively chose this book because it was the first week of the NFL season and I wanted to get in the […]
What book could live up to this cover?
Jaci Burton’s books were described to me as ‘explicit sports romances’. Those words, in that order, speak directly to my soul. Unfortunately, I was not really taken with this book. Rather than the characters ever feeling real to me, it ended up more like fantasy, football porn. (That comma is key, I am not talking the kind of fantasy where you pick your team each week and brag to your coworkers – more like the kind where someone dreams about being whisked away in a […]