Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

There was joy for having arrived, and sorrow for having left, and no way to even pretend this was home.

The Mars House by Natasha Pulley

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It’s called the illusory truth effect. If you hear something often enough, for long enough, you’ll believe it. Even if you originally knew that the information was false. ― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House It made January angry too, when people declared that giving someone poor some basic human consideration was the same as being Stalin. It was the kind of argument deployed by people who were saving up for their own private golf course. ― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House CBR17 Bingo: Migrant We […]

Love Islands

Not Like Before by Lily Seabrooke and Jacqueline Ramsden

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: starts with N.  I’ve been trying to read more books with trans authors and trans main characters. Given this perilous moment for trans people, I worry about the erasure of their stories. And I think it’s important to take them in. Also, the trans experience, like every other marginalized experience, is not one just of suffering and pain. Trans people feel joy, feel ecstasy, feel euphoria. Trans people live their lives like any other and mostly want the same […]

Sometimes a tiny bit of blood magic is fine, right?

A Queer Trade by K.J. Charles

Rag & Bone by K.J. Charles

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A Queer Trade is set in the same time period as A Case of Possession. Crispin Trederloe is having a bad week. Returning to London after visiting his ill mother, he learns that his mentor, Mr. Marleigh, was a dangerous warlock and is now dead. Marleigh’s possessions have already been sold or marked for auction, and this includes his boxes and boxes of research. Marleigh and Crispin practice blood magic, which is both extremely dangerous, unpredictable, and explicitly forbidden by England’s magical overseers. At fifteen, […]

Have you ever met a rich man somebody didn’t want to kill?

Hither, Page: Page and Sommers Book #1 by Cat Sebastian

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Probably he had the honest man’s instinctive distaste for subverting the course of justice. That was a luxury Leo never had. If only honest men knew how many lives had been saved with a bit of criminal conspiracy, they’d think it one of the cardinal virtues. ― Cat Sebastian, Hither, Page Leo Page and James Sommers end up in the same small English village in the years following WWII. James is a physician and he returned to the small village where he lived with his […]

How the legend might have started with books before lattes

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

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What’s cozy in the same way as a latte? Second-hand books. That’s what we get with Bookshops & Bonedust, and I’m down with that. This is a pretty good prequel, but it can be done as a stand-alone, and it also does a nice job of maybe setting up volume 3. The whole story starts with young and eager Viv getting ahead of herself and getting injured in a fight. The rest of her team leaves her behind to recover in middle of nowhere Murk, […]

He was handsome, Ben supposed, if you liked angry men.

It Takes Two to Tumble (Seducing the Sedgwicks, #1) by Cat Sebastian

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This was some unholy combination of desire and friendship and something else, because apparently when you took workaday lust and combined it with affection and threw in garden-variety honesty, you got something new and totally different.” ― Cat Sebastian, It Takes Two to Tumble At the start of the novel, Captain Phillip Dacre returned home from a two year voyage with the royal navy. His dutiful wife, Caroline, passed away while he was at sea, and he braced himself to face three children he barely […]



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