Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This broke my heart, and not in the good way

The Dravenhearst Brides by Lindsay Barrett

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I haven’t had a book break my heart the way The Dravenhearst Brides did in a long time. Since Lindsay Barrett is a new to me author, I went in with few expectations, but I was immediately drawn in. The Dravenhearst Brides is a gothic romance set in Kentucky in 1933, towards the end of Prohibition and is described as a loose retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Since the book is a loose retelling of Rebecca, I wasn’t surprised that two of the characters […]

If Jane was vain, and Rochester was…sort of the same

Dragonwyck (1945) by Anya Seton

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A Gothic scholar I follow on Twitter mentioned Dragonwyck quite recently, which recalled giddy memories of swooning at the suspense and romance and delicious clothes as an early teenager, probably too young to be reading about abusive relationships shrouded (at least initially) in glamour. But then again, I read Jane Eyre then too. So I ordered cheap secondhand paperback off Awesomebooks, and read it in a night. Miranda is a pretty farm girl with aristocratic aspirations, in Connecticut in the 1840s. A distant cousin, Nicholas Van […]

A Rose by Any Other Name

Merlin's Keep by Madeleine Brent

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As a big Modesty Blaise fan, I’ve always enjoyed Peter O’Donnell’s writing ability and reread his 15 Modesty books every couple of years. Imagine my surprise from his obituary to discover that he wrote gothic historic romances under the name “Madeleine Brent.” Merlin’s Keep (named after the birds and not the wizard) won the Romantic Novel of the Year for 1978. While I’ve probably never read a gothic historic romance in my life, I ordered several of his romances and started with Merlin’s Keep (because […]



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