Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Stop dreaming about the spires. It was a dreadful place and those were dreadful people, and you and I got caught in their games and paid for it.”

Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles

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If you read The Secret History and hated the characters, and the bleak ending made you feel terrible, this might be the book for you! In her first non-romance, we’ve got K.J. Charles trying her hand (and succeeding) at a historical mystery, dark academia style. It’s 1905, and our main character is Jeremy “Jem” Kite, who has just been fired from his job when a letter accusing him of murder showed up in his employers’ mail. This is not the first or even the tenth such letter […]

A cozy fantasy about grief.

House of Frank by Kay Synclaire

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A cozy fantasy about grief and found family, and the first book I’ve read from the relatively new publishing experiment, Bindery Books. I would read further books from this author for sure, but I also think this one was pretty flawed. I actually think it needed at least one more round of edits, if not two. I have no idea how Bindery’s editing process works in comparison to traditional publishers, but this needed to be worked over for clarity, both in the writing itself (some sentences […]

Understandable how you could mistake this knife fetishist for a murderer, but he didn’t do it.

Knife Skills for Beginners by Orlando Murrin

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Thanks to NetGalley, RBmedia, and Recorded Books for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Yes, this book was written by a TV chef. Apparently he was on Masterchef—I’ve never seen it. But unless he used a very secret ghostwriter, he did a good job! I truly have no idea why the ratings for this book are so low coming out of the UK*, or why the cozy mystery people have not come flocking (though this isn’t a cozy, it does have […]

“You could call T. Rex the James Dean of dinosaurs: it lived fast and died young.”

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte

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This, friends, is a dinosaur. I believe Pesto’s ancestors would be confused by him, but that’s the beauty of nature. It’s super weird and always doing unexpected things. This book manages to impart a lot of information about the evolution, time on earth, and extinction of (most) dinosaurs while at the same time being very readable and fun to consume. At one point the author uses the phrase “crow-sized weirdos with wings on their arms and legs” to describe a species of dinosaur that differed […]

Literally a snoozefest.

Sufficiently Advanced Magic (Arcane Ascension, #1) by Andrew Rowe

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DNF @ 16% I can’t anymore. This book quite literally put me to sleep—twice–and I cannot fathom torturing myself with it any longer. The 105 pages I managed to read were more than enough to tell me that this is not for me. This is a LitRPG book, and you might like it if you are really, really, really, really into gaming scenarios, and you need nothing else to sustain you in a story. The narration read to me like, “First I did this, and […]

“Every child a wanted child, every mother a willing mother.”

Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall

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Hello, unsettlingly relevant book. This feels even more relevant now than it did three years ago when it was published. [frustrated sigh] This definitely felt like a debut (some small pacing issues, and a plot choice that detracted from the tension of the story, etc.) but the subject matter was so fascinating, and the lives of these women so clearly on the page emotionally carried the book and made it extremely compelling, despite its flaws. We are following three women in three different time periods: […]



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