Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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), […]

A Flying, Glow-in-the-Dark Dinosaur in the Modern Day

Umboi Island by JJ Dupuis

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Laura is the host of Creature X, a cryptozoology show, despite being an avowed skeptic. In search of the Ropen, she and her team go to a remote island in Papua New Guinea, where they become entangled in a mystery when a dead man is found in one of their tents. Though billed a mystery, this is more of a good old-fashioned action-adventure novel, complete with martial arts, gun fights, and a far-off setting. What sets this book above many other old-fashioned action-adventure novel is […]

A Moody and Mysterious YA Graphic Novel That Also Somewhat Frustrated Me

Fly by Night by Tara O'Connor

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I picked this up somewhat randomly at Barnes & Noble, who have happily broken out their YA graphic novels into their own section at the store I go to, so I don’t have to dig through the whole YA section anymore. It makes me really happy to be living through this renaissance of graphic novels, and I’m excited to see it continue expanding. Fly by Night is a good example of the interesting work that’s being done now, and it was an enjoyable read. Dee’s […]

She of the Diamante Garters and Pearl-Handled Pistol

The Lady with the Gun Asks the Questions by Kelly Greenwood

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In this collection of detective stories, Phryne Fisher recovers missing jewelry and missing people, thwarts blackmailers, and cracks codes, all while remaining as cool and unflappable as ever. I adore the Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. The author wrote a short note at the beginning of the book about how Miss Fisher came to be – she wanted to write a sort of female James Bond, with the glamour and the adventure and the romance, except better than James Bond because her books are not sexist […]

“The doom has come upon me.”

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9) by Agatha Christie

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One part of this was uncomfortably dated, but otherwise this was a fun listen. There is somewhat of an epic red herring (I think that’s what we would call it) in this one, and I didn’t see it coming at all. It helps that I really like Emilia Fox as a narrator. The one downside with her is that she flattens out the characters with American accents, but her British characters are superb. An American film star moves into Miss Marple’s neighborhood (in the very […]

This series is not for me

Still Life by Louise Penny

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Hoo boy…after the high of the previous book I reviewed, this one took a hard turn into disappointment.  It should have been everything I like in a book – a no-nonsense detective, mysterious death, some quirky characters who may or may not be the perpetrator of the crime.  It’s even set in small town Quebec – I’m Canadian, this should be great!  Even most of the reviews were glowing, and as the first book in a series I hoped to be able to settle into […]



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