Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A novel published in serial form and it shows

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

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Margaret Hale is the daughter of a country pastor who has had a sudden crisis of faith and has given up his position. Margaret has spent several years living with her aunt and cousin as a well-loved household assistant, but has recently returned to her parents’ home upon her cousin’s marriage. Shortly after moving home her father informs her that he will be moving the family to an industrial town in north England. Margaret’s father is too much a coward to tell his wife about […]

A Lady Unlike Any Other

A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas

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4.5 stars I keep struggling to summarise the plot in a good way, so I’ll just let the blurb do it: With her inquisitive mind, Charlotte Holmes has never felt comfortable with the demureness expected of the fairer sex in upper class society. But even she never thought that she would become a social pariah, an outcast fending for herself on the mean streets of London.  When the city is struck by a trio of unexpected deaths and suspicion falls on her sister and her […]

The best in the series so far. This is more like it, Ms. Kleypas

Devil's Daughter by Lisa Kleypas

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This is the fifth book in the Ravenels series. While you don’t have to have read the previous books in the series, it would probably enhance your enjoyment and make you more familiar with most of the cast of characters. While you also don’t NEED to have read it, you really should read Devil in Winter, because it’s a classic of the genre, and will give you more insight in some of the supporting characters here. Plot summary from Goodreads, because I finished this book over a month […]

Sorely Lacking Keanu Reeves. One Star.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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The year is 1897 and Bram Stoker is a bored businessmen who boosts his income by writing pulpy novels. The most famous of these, simply titled Dracula, was not an immediate hit, but would turn out to define Stoker’s legacy. This isn’t entirely undeserved, but outside of its snug historical pocket the novel doesn’t come across all that well. The story is well-known to nearly everyone, and I was quite surprised at how closely, at first, it follows the 1993 movie. And yet this film, […]

A revenge plot that thankfully goes completely wrong

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Felicity Faircloth may be the daughter of an Earl, but she is now on the fringes of society and her family desperately need her to land a rich husband, sooner rather than later, please. She’s not at all happy to discover just how dire the family’s finances are (and that they’ve kept the truth from her for over a year), but she may have just doomed them all, but telling a very inconvenient lie at a ball held by the reclusive Duke of Marwick. The […]

Blackout! One case where I prefer the literary criticism to the actual novel

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Bingo Square: This Old Thing I read Jane Eyre in high school for fun when I was trying to read classics because I thought I needed to better myself.  I can’t say that was a very successful venture, since I didn’t end up liking that many of them without a teacher’s guidance to point out some of the deeper meaning (although I loved East of Eden and Anna Karenina).  Jane Eyre was definitely one I didn’t enjoy that much because it was long and boring. […]



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