Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Home is a choice and sometimes a hard one. What you choose to accept. What you embrace.”

Lute by Jennifer Marie Thorne

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Nina Treadway is the lady of Lute, but she’s only lived there for seven years, since she got married to Hugh. As a foreigner, she doesn’t believe in the island’s day of the tithe, but as things start going wrong all around her, she wonders if it might be more than a superstition. Folk horror! A mysterious day of human sacrifice as an island extracts the price of its bounty from its residents! An American abroad! And that cover is so very beautiful, and so […]

Living with the Inexplicable

The Dyatlov Pass Mystery by Cédric Mayen, Jandro González

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When nine hikers go missing on the slopes of Dyatlov Pass in 1959, a prosecutor working for the Soviet Union must attempt to uncover the truth, though his job is only made more difficult by the strange circumstances and the caginess of the government. The Dyatlov Pass mystery is a case I’ve heard of before. Even decades later, there’s no consensus on what caused the hikers to flee their tents into the snow, where they all eventually froze to death. There’s plenty of strange features […]

Retracing the Past

Deception at Dixon Pass by Cindi Myers

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Left for dead in a snowstorm, Declan can’t remember what’s brought him there when he’s rescued by scientist Grace. But he knows he’ll have to be quick if he’s going to be able to catch a serial killer who’s slipped through his fingers once already. Harlequin romances are my comfort reads, but I haven’t explored much of the Intrigue imprint, which publishes romantic suspense. This seemed like a fun book to try out due to the central mystery – a nameless man who looms out […]

Norway 1620, France 1731, Pennsylvania 1929, Lesotho 1948…

Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson

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This is the story of many women and men from across the centuries and around the world who have been tried for witchcraft, and the often surprising historical currents that led them there, and influenced whether they would be allowed to live or die. I was born about an hour away from Salem, Massachusetts, though I never went to visit until 2019. Of course I went in October, which is the absolute peak of their tourist station, and battled my way through a crowded open […]

It’s beautiful because it’s melancholy. It’s a complicated kind of beauty.

Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

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I am struggling with getting my review of Jenny Holiday’s Canadian Boyfriend right. I really enjoyed it. It’s a romance surfing on big waves of grief and trauma. For a big chunk of the book Mike and Aurora have a quasi employer/employee relationship that some people will, reasonably, consider a hard no. I want to put all this up front, because it’s important information for readers, and I don’t want my whole review to be about the things that might put a reader off of […]

Cat Transformations and Found Family

Spell Bound by FT Lukens

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Rook has a secret – he’s non-magical, yet a powerful sorcerer has taken him on as her apprentice. But when the Magical Consortium comes down on them for breaking the law, he ends up going on the run with Sun, the apprentice of a rival sorcerer. I  read FT Lukens’s So This is Ever After last year, which I gave an A for the romance but found the other aspects of the story less impressive. But I’ll try most things twice, and intrigued by the […]



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