Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Yes, let the Taylor Swift-lyric title and the beautiful cover lure you in.

Don't Want You Like a Best Friend (Mischief & Matchmaking, #1) by Emma R. Alban

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[finishes book] [three and a half weeks later] I don’t know why I’m having such a mental block about writing this review, so I’m just going to go and see what happens. [two days later] This is an adult queer Regency romance featuring two young women as the protagonists, and it’s the first sapphic historical I think that I have really loved*. There still isn’t that much f/f historical romance or ones involving nb folks to begin with, but the ones I’ve read have not […]

Bonus: Ridiculous 1830s Fashion

Dukes Prefer Blondes by Loretta Chase

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Five series and 28 or so books into a very successful career, it comes as no surprise that Loretta Chase is a really consistent historical romance author who provides great entertainment value combined with sincere emotional connections. I loved Dukes Prefer Blondes when I reviewed it for Cannonball Read in 2016 during Romancelandia’s Year of Difficult Men*  and I adore it  now. I went back to revisit a specific scene and the next thing I knew, I’d re-read to the end and then gone back […]

Like the Oregon Trail Game with a Bodice Ripping Mod

Emerald Fire by Julia Grice

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Fleeing her plantation home to escape her lecherous cousin, Emerald ends up joining a wagon train headed to California as a mother’s helper. She’s drawn to their guide Mace, but has a long way to go before she can reach her happy ending. More a pioneer adventure than a true romance, we follow Emerald on her way west as the train tangles with illness and injury, hostile Native Americans and a pair of bank robbers. We encounter all kinds of curious characters both on and […]

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, […]

Fake marriage and further hijinks

The Secret Service of Tea and Treason by India Holton

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Alice Dearlove works for the secret organisation the Agency of Undercover Note Takers, or A.U.N.T., staffed by spies and agents disguised as ladies’ maids, butlers, footmen, and other household staff who mostly go unnoticed by the higher classes, but are usually in a position to see and hear everything. She’s one of their top agents, known within A.U.N.T only as Agent A. Usually, Miss Dearlove works alone and gets excellent results while doing so. Now she faces one of the biggest challenges of her career. […]

Magical queer historical romance

Of Socialites and Prizefights by Arden Powell

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Arden Powell has been on my radar for a while and I’ve been collecting their books, but lesbians is what finally broke the seal (I am but a simple lesbian lol) and now I want to dive into the whole Flos Magicae backlist to see all the characters in their own stories. Deepa is a singer at a club and doesn’t believe in love, so when one of her paramours curses her to become a leopard every midnight and tells her the only way to […]



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