Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

To Be a Diplomat’s Wife

An Unusual Courtship by Lynne Connolly

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Juliet is enamored of diplomat Val, but she believes that her scandalous family and poor prospects would make a poor political wife. But when Val’s fiancée reveals that she’s in love with another man, she supposes it wouldn’t be too bad to pretend to be engaged to him for the length of a state dinner. This is the second book in the Brazen Burrells series, about a trio of sisters who take Regency-era London with their beauty, wits, and little else. This is the story of Juliet, […]

Epic bravery and sensible fears

Promises Stronger Than Darkness by Charlie Jane Anders

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There was a point several years ago when I got frustrated with YA and all the teenagers saving the world/saving the universe. Part of my frustration was that I don’t want kids to have to save the world. I got over that fairly quickly, but I remembered that feeling towards the end of Promises Stronger Than Darkness. Now I am so grateful that teens have a whole body of literature about fighting oppression and fascism. I might get a bit esoteric, because I don’t want to […]

Honor is a personal choice, and one which humans will admire—up to a point.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

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This book is grim, well written, but grim and I didn’t enjoy reading it. I know plenty of other people will like it, because some people enjoy grim. I nearly abandoned it several times. Emily Tesh’s main character, Valkyr, starts off Some Desperate Glory as a joyless, intolerant fanatic who thinks she is better than almost everyone else. To be fair, she has been raised to be so, in what we come to realize is an extremist death cult. Earth has been destroyed and a […]

Sinister Shores

Murder By the Sea by Robin Jarossi, David Howard

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Based on the CBS reality show Murder By the Sea, ten murders that took place in various seaside towns and resorts of Britain are recounted in this book. I like true crime, but my medium of choice is podcasts – I very rarely watch it on TV. As such, I have never heard of this show, but the central theme of murder informed by location was one that sounded interesting to me. That the chapters had been derived from episodes of a show was evident […]

What Is to Come Has Already Been Decided

The Angel Maker by Alex North

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Katie and her brother Chris have had a strained relationship ever since the brutal attack on Chris that changed their lives forever. Decades later, it might be too late to fix things when Chris goes missing. In this book, we are introduced to two separate mysteries that inevitably wind together – the disappearance of Chris Shaw, and the murder of Alan Hobbs – and the way that they come together made me exercise my brain and sometimes stretched my incredulity. I would hesitate to call […]

The Long Road to Brighton

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

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In 1984, the IRA killed five people and came dangerously close to assassinating then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – and yet this disaster has gone mostly undiscussed in recent years. In this book, Carroll brings together the long chain of events which led up to the bombing, and unravels the complicated investigation that followed. Having been to school in both the United States and India, I like to think that I have gained a wider perspective on world history than I would have otherwise, but there […]



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