Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Splashing into the Rivers of London

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

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I’d seen this author and series pop up from time to time in CBR, and my curiosity finally overcame my aversion to jumping into a series. How could I continue to ignore the siren call of that terrific cover?! I am ever-so-glad that I went ahead and judged a book by its cover, because I thoroughly enjoyed this police-procedural-gone-off-the-rails. It had all of the inner workings of the police bureaucracy that I, for some reason  find strangely enthralling. The officers had all of the spark […]

“The victims of Jack the Ripper were never ‘just prostitutes’; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that in itself is enough.”

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

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When I think back to my experiences as an undergrad history major I was often one of very few, if not the only, women in the room. Each course was the same; walk in, pick a position near the front of the room, but off to the side so as to not be considered aggressive but not be lost in the sea of testosterone, and hunker down to have to talk over those who would talk over you. I eventually got to a place of […]

Six Drinks and A Few Empires

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

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I need to clean off my coffee table. I remembered something from A History of the World in 6 Glasses, but then couldn’t find the book to confirm it. I figured maybe I’d finished it way earlier than I thought and had given it away. But no, it was just buried under stuff on the coffee table. Turns out, I hadn’t quite finished it either. The premise is a history of cultural development around the world as it connects to the general history of the […]

Steampunk, historical fiction, mystery?

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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I love steampunk and this cover is as steampunk at they get (plus the hardcover one actually has a cutout on the cover that reveals the watch on the inside page which is a really cool design).  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley is a delightful read that defies genres.  The book takes place in Victorian London when the Irish Nationalist movement is terrorizing the city.   Bombings at Scotland yard and Victoria station are being investigated.  Could anybody but a master clockworker have […]

Now and Again

Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

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3.5 stars In which giving people the ability to time travel goes as well as you would expect. Alice Payne is a highway-person in 1788, using her girlfriend’s clockwork robot to assist in her robberies.  Meanwhile, Prudence Zuniga is in 1889, trying to stop the first in a series of events that will lead to a War across time and history. It is not going well. Every time she interferes, the events in history play out anyway. She clearly is getting more desperate, and seems […]

A Story I Should Have Learned In History

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

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This is hard to write because there are already so many great Cannonball reviews about this book. So, I will just start by saying – You need to read this book! This story should be taught in every school. I was amazed that I had never heard of the Radium Women, and now I will never forget them. During WWI, women were hired to paint dials on watches using a brilliant new material – paint infused with radium. This paint mixture was lauded for its […]



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