Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Don’t be fooled by the title: there are no dragons in this book

Dragonmeade by Rona Randall

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I don’t think I was in the right mood for this, but I’m trying to get through some of my used-bookstore purchases before I allow myself to buy more. I think now might not be a great time for gothic romances – mostly I wanted to set fire to all the male characters. Even a spunky female heroine is still basically her husband’s property in a gothic/regency/whatever, and just UGH. Our spunky heroine Eustacia grows up with a single mom who runs a gambling parlor […]

How to Fall in Love With a Peacock

The Pride of the Peacock by Victoria Holt

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There are slow burn books and then there is this one where nothing of importance happens for a good 70 percent of the book and then you just have an ineffectual heroine through most of the story who somehow saves herself in the end by talking. Definitely not one of Holt’s best. With a hero that I was rooting against and then the setting moving to Australia, this book just had too much that in the end didn’t work for it. “The Pride of the […]

A Slight Change in the Formula

The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton

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Over the years, Kate Morton has turned into a must buy for me.  She is a bit of a comfort read – family mysteries uncovered, slightly tragic stories with the potential for hope and better in future generations.  There’s always a twist and turn, but she still manages to surprise and create interesting characters. The Clockmaker’s Daughter is a bit of a break in the norm for her.  While in most ways, it is like her previous novels, it is also more focused on a […]

“Get it, Fred? I’m holey!”

Black December by Scott Hunter

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DCI Brendan Moran, still recovering from a severe car accident the year before, is called out to a Catholic boarding school named Charnford Abbey, where one of the monks has been murdered (I accidentally typed ‘monkeys’ instead of ‘monks’ here, which would have been better). The abbot and other monks seem strangely uncooperative. Soon, another body is found, unravelling the ancient secrets of the closed order and blah blah blah. The story also includes narcolepsy, a group of cunning Romanian squatters, a long-lost love lost […]

How Many Ghosts Does a House Hold?

The Looking-Glass Portrait by Linda Hilton

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Well I do love a good Gothic mystery. Though this is set in contemporary times, Hilton does a great job of evoking the mood of many a Gothic novel. I definitely know that at times I wanted to shake the heroine in this one (Thomasina Ryder known as Tom to her friends and family) because she does some things that must be written down in a Gothic novel that every female character must do. We of course have the warning signs about the love interest, […]

Sorely Lacking Keanu Reeves. One Star.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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The year is 1897 and Bram Stoker is a bored businessmen who boosts his income by writing pulpy novels. The most famous of these, simply titled Dracula, was not an immediate hit, but would turn out to define Stoker’s legacy. This isn’t entirely undeserved, but outside of its snug historical pocket the novel doesn’t come across all that well. The story is well-known to nearly everyone, and I was quite surprised at how closely, at first, it follows the 1993 movie. And yet this film, […]



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