Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Neverland will never let go…

Hooked by A.C. Wise

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He remembers drowning. That single sentence, recurring often in Hooked, A.C. Wise’s sequel to Wendy, Darling, is the cornerstone of the existential dread that permeates the story. Described as dark fantasy I think this book edges deeper into horror, more even than the first book, which had moments of horror. This is a mean tale and a reinvention of Neverland and the Peter Pan mythos into something modern and terrifying at its core. What set Wendy, Darling apart from the pack of other modern takes on Peter […]

Different Scandals in Different Places

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

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Bingo 11: Scandal A Strange and Stubborn Endurance opens with a scandal of sorts (or at least the inciting incident that gets the plot going does), and there’s a fear and use of gossip that gets brought up and/or used off and on throughout the story. There is a content warning at the beginning about the scandal which involves on-page sexual violence as well as self-harm and suicidal ideation; side note, I’m a little surprised that the one murder that does succeed before the final […]

Opposites Attract Enemies to Friends to Lovers

The Stand-up Groomsman by Jackie Lau

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I know a Jackie Lau romance is going to make my heart happy. In some ways The Stand-up Groomsman is a departure from the types of Lau books I’ve enjoyed in the past. In this follow up to last year’s Donut Fall in Love Lau takes a more serious tone and unpacks some bigger emotional truths, in this case how we handle expectations and how it interacts with larger family dynamics. But in most ways, this is almost exactly the type of book I’ve come […]

The Girl on the (Subway) Train

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

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A.k.a. the time that a weaponised use of Freddie Mercury had me sobbing at 1am with the book pressed against my forehead, begging for a happy ending. Yeah. In my defence, the reason I was doing that was that the book would not let me put it down until I have finished, after I had brazenly decided to start a reading session at 11:30pm in bed, knowing that I was heading into the climax. One Last Stop is Casey McQuiston’s follow up to Red, White and […]

“When I am with you, I feel about as far from anything that has ever hurt me as it is possible to be.”

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

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After reading other Alexis Hall books earlier this year, the excellent Boyfriend Material and the quite good Something Fabulous, I became very excited for the promise of A Lady for a Duke. And that excitement was well placed, as I very much enjoyed this outing. While it didn’t quite reach the heights of Boyfriend Material for me, I felt Hall did a much better job with the tone of historical romance than he had in romp in Something Fabulous, even if the pacing bothered me […]

Meh Valentine’s Reading

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

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I decided to do some Valentine’s Day reading; I figured A Marvellous Light might be a safer bet than usual (I’m not a romance person) because a writer of a romantic novel that I did like had a positive blurb on the back. The basic premise has a lot of familiar elements: two people are forced to work together, don’t exactly get along, are forced into an investigation (how to cure Robin’s curse, and what happened to Robin’s predecessor who seems to have gone missing), […]



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