Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Thin Line Between Fantasy and Reality

Mary and the Birth of Frankstein by Anne Eekhout

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The year is 1812, and fourteen-year-old Mary Goodwin is living in pastoral Dundee, where she may find love but may find danger as well. The year is 1816, and eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley is living in rainy Geneva, where she may conceive of something that is strange and fearful and all hers, if she will allow herself to do it. I have still not read Frankenstein. (I keep meaning to! There’s just so many books to read!) But I am familiar with its plot, and the […]

“The problem with family is that they know where all the levers are that make you move. They’re usually the ones who installed the levers in the first place.”

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

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I picked this book up for a  read along with a few friends and it’s a great one for the season: one part silly, one part spooky, one part WAIT WHAT?! The general consensus from the group was that we liked it, but maybe didn’t love it and that it was a bit of a slow build, some felt it was too slow, I was along for the ride. Someone who had read other Kingfisher novels was surprised at how differernt it was in tone, […]

“And there is nothing more dangerous than a creature who pretends to be one thing and is in truth another.”

Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

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This is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth focused on Lady Macbeth. This version is split into five acts (just like the play!), with Lady Macbeth as a 17-year-old new bride of the title character. Something I found particularly interesting is that the author chose to reflect the various languages spoken in eleventh-century Scotland, so the characters have different versions of their names depending on the language used. In the book, the main character thinks of herself as Roscille, so for the sake of this review, […]

Even a Hot Topic clerk will smirk at these

Oh My Goth: Jokes for When You Feel Dead Inside by Andrew Shaffer

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Ah, the creator Andrew Shaffer! The person I love to hate and hate to love! Yet, he keeps (pounding fists on my desk) DRAGS ME BACK! Time and time again! I am thinking, “OH Master has given Dobby clothes!” But oh no! Dobby has been fooled and I am right back reading another mad capped work by them! Okay, seriously, I really did not realize how prolific Shaffer is. Oh My Goth: Jokes for When You Feel Dead Inside is a small collection (read online […]

A lovely historical romance with some supernatural elements

The Widow of Rose House by Diana Biller

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4.5 stars Nowhere Book Bingo: Came out more than 4 years ago CBR16 Sweet Books: New (new author) It’s 1875 and Professor Samuel Moore is doing marvellously, thanks to the many inventions he and his family are coming up with. What he really wants to do, though, is investigate and possibly prove the existence of ghosts, and to do that, he requires an introduction to the infamous Mrs. Alva Webster, a widow with a scandalous reputation. Sam doesn’t really care about Mrs. Webster’s apparently lurid past, […]

An Escaped Eccentric (ft. Two Lovers)

Captured by Mary Lancaster

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Freed from her constrained life by the death of her autocratic father, Hera decides to take up a companion position where no one knows her. But as her assignment turns increasingly sinister, she turns to Justin, the doctor who attended her father before he died, for help. This is the second book in Mary Lancaster’s The Duel series, which follows the aftermath of a duel in which an army officer kills the cold-hearted Duke of Cuttyngham. Hera is the duke’s daughter, and Justin the friend […]



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