Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Now that that is all taken care of, let’s talk about love and blackmail.”

A Proposal They Can't Refuse by Natalie Caña

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I landed on 3 stars for Natalie Caña’s A Proposal They Can’t Refuse. I knew there were going to be some family hijinks, because the blurb promises that Kamilah and Liam are forced into a fake engagement because their grandfather’s are threatening their dreams. I wasn’t expecting the heavy-duty unhealthy family dynamics. Caña writes an engaging story with well drawn characters. I had a hard time putting it down. But I screamed a few times because the there were moments where family members seemed to […]

Catharsis

The Castleton Massacre: Survivors’ Stories of the Killins Femicide by Sharon Anne Cook and Margaret Carson

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In 1963, a former minister, long separated from his wife, went on a rampage and murdered four people, two of whom were pregnant. Now one of the survivors of the massacre and her cousin have put together the story of what happened. I have never heard of this case before, but picked up this book because of the identities of the authors – one is the niece of the murderer, and one the daughter of one of the victims, but they were raised together and […]

The Schoolhouse Blizzard

Maddy and the Monstrous Storm by Julie Gilbert

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Maddy  is new to the prairie, but when she and her classmates are trapped in their schoolhouse by a ferocious blizzard, she must lead them all to safety. I’d first heard of the Schoolhouse Blizzard a year or two ago, when I read Melanie Benjamin’s The Children’s Blizzard, which similarly followed a schoolteacher and a group of schoolchildren who were trapped by the snow and had to fight to survive. This book covers the same topic and themes, but in a way that is more accessible […]

A Family History

Seven Aunts by Staci Lola Drouillard

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Author Drouillard tells the history of her family in recent generations through the lives of her seven aunts, four on her mother’s side and three on her father’s. I’ve always been interested in family histories, because no two are the same – that, and that there are generally a lot of secrets to uncover and I am a nosy sort of person. The fact that Seven Aunts is so wholeheartedly focused on the lives of the women in the family, tracing their parallels and divergences, made it […]

Road Trip Romance

No Rings Attached by Rachel Lacey

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Lia is on the hunt for a fake girlfriend to go to her brother’s wedding with her, and her best friend Rosie offers up her childhood friend Grace as an option. Sparks fly when the two meet, but Grace has a complicated past and is wary of relationships. This is the second book in the series, but reads perfectly well as a stand-alone. Though the story starts off with the fake-dating trope, things quickly heat up between the couple until they enter a complicated relationship […]

“I should just follow you clowns around…Find all the trouble in the galaxy that way…”

Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Things are not going well when the second book in The Final Architecture series, Eyes of the Void, opens. In Shards of Earth, we learned the Architects were themselves slaves, forced to destroy worlds. But the contact Idris Telemer made with the Architect isn’t stopping the destruction of planets and ships. Idris is with the Partheni, trying to find a strain of the clones that can be made into Intermediaries without the coercion and the high death rate in the Hugh (Council of Humans) program. […]



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