Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In Which I Catch Up On My New Year’s Backlog of Reviews Pt. 3

To Tell You the Truth by Gilly MacMillan

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This is another one of my popcorn domestic thrillers. This time, the so-called perfect couple is a best selling murder fiction author and her not-so-bestselling, oh-so-slightly-resentful husband/manager. She is haunted by her little brother’s disappearance when she was a child (that she may or may not be at fault for) and the voice of her main character in her book series, who likes to pop up and chat with her at inconvenient times. This sounds more whimsical then the book actually is. There’s a lot […]

More pathos, less cop drama, please

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I finally gave in to BookBub and Book Gorilla’s insistence that I buy this book for $1.99 and…bought this book for $1.99. I’m very picky about mysteries, in that I don’t read a lot of them and expect them to be as good as any other fiction I’d read. Sadly, to me, this is a book that would work better if it made it up its mind more as to what it wanted to be: a meditation on motherhood, self-perception, and external perceptions, or a […]

What She Knew

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Rachel Jenner was living every parent’s worst nightmare. Her eight year old son, Ben, was missing and she was the last person to see him. Recently divorced, she was spending time with her son walking in the woods with their dog, something that they had done in the past. Ben wanted to run ahead, and she let him, and when she arrives at their meeting place moments later, he’s gone. Making matters worse, when the police have a press conference and ask her to read […]

“But here’s the thing: none of us deserve anything. That’s an illusion we all exist under.”

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“A year ago, just after Ben’s disappearance, I was involved in a press conference, which was televised. My role was to appeal for help in finding him. The police gave me a script to read. I assumed people watching it would automatically understand who I was, that they would see I was a mother whose child was missing, and who cared about nothing apart from getting him back. Last year Rachel Jenner and her son, Ben, went for a walk in the park. He runs […]

Every parent’s worst nightmare

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What She Knew is Gilly Macmillan’s debut novel, and it reminded me a lot of Tana French (but not quite as good) or Sophie Hannah (but a little better) — rotating viewpoints, a distraught mother you can’t quite trust, and set in England. I didn’t realize until I’d finished it that I’d also read Macmillian’s follow up (The Perfect Girl), which I believe I called “perfectly unmemorable”. This, too, was a fast-paced read, but I think it’s going to stick with me a little better. “A year ago, […]

Fine for a Hudson News Buy

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I purchased The Perfect Girl at an airport newsstand because I’d heard good things about What She Knew, Ms. Macmillan’s previous novel. I ended up staying up really late finishing it the day after I bought it (I’m probably the only person who got 5 hours of sleep in Vegas not because of the gambling or the drinking, but because I wanted to finish a book). However, even though I really enjoyed reading the book, I don’t actually think I liked the book. It is […]



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