Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Long Love The King

American Royals by Katharine McPhee

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I read this as part of a library reading challenge: genre I don’t read. I don’t read a lot of romance and, while this won’t change my mind on that, I can appreciate why people like this. Being a mystery fan, I expect that there’s a certain amount of cynicism with the genre. Cynicism towards governance, relationships, general human behavior. I feel like the best mysteries and crime novels tell us about ourselves, as if holding up a cracked but clean mirror. Romance has kind […]

“We are never feckless”, I told her coldly. “We are full to the brim with feck.”

An Unexpected Peril by Deanna Raybourn

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Spoiler warning! This is book 6 in an ongoing series. There will be minor spoilers for earlier books in the series. You can read these without having any background, but it’s always best to start at the beginning, which happens to be A Curious Beginning.    Intrepid lepidopterist and sometime crime solver Veronica Speedwell and her grouchy partner and now lover Revelstoke Templeton-Vane (goes by Stoker) are working on preparing a memorial exhibition at the Curiosity Club for one of its recently deceased members, pioneer mountain climber […]

Sadly, yet another Alyssa Cole hero kind of unworthy of his heroine

How to Catch a Queen by Alyssa Cole

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3.5 stars Official book description: When Shanti Mohapi weds the king of Njaza, her dream of becoming a queen finally comes true. But it’s nothing like she imagined. Shanti and her husband may share an immediate and powerful attraction, but her subjects see her as an outsider, and everything she was taught about being the perfect wife goes disastrously wrong.   A king must rule with an iron fist, and newly crowned King Sanyu was born perfectly fitted for the gauntlet, even if he wishes […]

Make sure you vote!

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

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Well, this was an interesting read right before the 2020 U.S. Presidential election!  There are parts in this that are hilarious, heartbreaking, and harrowing.  You have a romance story involving politics, and in both the book and in real life, the election of 2020 is super stressful!  (In the book, if the incumbent president loses, she steps down and a gross white man takes her place. In real life, if the incumbent president wins, thousands more people will needlessly die.  A bit more stressful for […]

Can’t compete with Red, White, and Royal Blue

The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

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When American college student Rebecca “Bex” Porter enrolls in a semester abroad at Oxford, she finds herself living on the same floor as Prince Nicholas, grandson of Queen Eleanor of England. Bex and Nick quickly become friends, only to accidentally fall in love. But young love is difficult, especially when one is heir to the throne. Will Prince Nick and Bex get their happily ever after, or will a secret tear them apart? The Royal We started off great; the first third was fun and […]

Better than the others, but still not a book I loved

A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole

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3.5 stars Naledi “Ledi” Smith’s parents died when she was very little, and she was shuffled through a series of foster homes her entire childhood. She learned to rely on no one but herself. When she keeps getting persistent e-mails about some African country named Thesolo and how she’s the crown prince’s intended, she obviously assumes that these communications are spam and deletes them all. Now she’s working hard to get her degree in epidemiology and waitressing on the side, in between worrying about her […]



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