Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If You Mixed The Andromeda Strain and Pacific Rim, You’d Get This

Cold Storage by David Koepp

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It took me a while to get this whole reading thing going again, and I figured what would finally jumpstart it would be a good old goofy disease thriller. Folks, I was not wrong. According to my e-reader’s stats, it took me a little over five hours to finish this book, and that seems about right. The plot starts out very similar to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain: Some kind of organism has hitched a ride back to earth after getting mutated in space and has […]

A ghost story, almost-horror-novel-but-not, for people who don’t really like ghost stories or horror. And people who do!

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

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I don’t normally do ghost stories, but I recently joined Book of the Month, and this was the only one of January’s books that seemed like something I might really like, so I ordered it. Plus it was also being touted as a mystery and a thriller, it fit well with my January theme of reading books by and about badass ladies (double check on that here) and with my run of books about shitty men doing bad things to women and girls. Also it’s […]

The Haunting of Rookward House is my new favorite Darcy Coates novel

The Haunting of Rookward House by Darcy Coates

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The Haunting of Rookward House is a creepy horror novel and it’s the first book in a while to actually scare me. Main character Guy is down on luck. He’s living with his mom and unable to find a job. While helping Mom clean out the attic, he discovers the deed to Rookward House, which Mom doesn’t really remember inheriting. Mom seems a bit ditsy. Guy immediately decides that selling Rookward House is the answer to their problems as it will give them enough money […]

“Men are everywhere. If I ran away from here, there would be more men all over the world.”

Dead Girls by Abigail Tarttelin

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Wow. I tell you what, wow. That’s a reference to the 1997 animated film Anastasia that I am pulling out now as a special occasion, because this book deserves it. I mean, wow. So before I get to why I’m wowing all over this review, the plot: It’s spring 1999 in a small English countryside village. Eleven year-old Thera and Billie have been best friends (“best, true, forever friends”) since before they were even born. Thera and Billy are imaginative, playful, and clever, and right […]

The Slowest Thriller Ever Written

A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine

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A long time horror fan, I stumbled my way into thrillers and suspense last year, and became quite hooked. The anxious feelings, wondering what was lurking in a dark hallway (or on the next page), was chilling and delightful. The comparative lack of blood and guts, of which I have become less a fan, also delightful. So as my algorithm in Amazon updated to suggest more suspense, and I signed up for a newsletter or three dedicated to the thrill and suspense genre, Barbara Vine’s […]

I really need half stars on this one.

Sadie by Courtney Summers

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Firstly, I’m nearly certain that I would have given this four stars unreservedly had I not done the audio version. YMMV, obviously, on all books. But here, the audio really pulled me out of the story. I’ll explain. So this book is about bad things that happen to girls, and it’s split into two parts that alternate every other chapter. The first is a fake podcast with a host who is trying to track down the missing 19 year old, Sadie Hunter, after a family […]



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