Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About narfna

CBR 4
CBR 5
CBR 6
CBR 7
CBR 8
CBR 9
CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant
CBR17 Participant
CBR18 Participant
CBR18 Levels
CBR18 Comments

Good evening, everyone. I'm Leslie Monster, and this is Nightline. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: narfna's Quick Questions interview.)

narfna's Reviews:

A Japanese puzzle mystery I actually managed to figure out!

Newcomer (Kyoichiro Kaga, #2) by Keigo Higashino

by Leave a Comment

Last year I read Malice, the first book from this series translated into English, and it was so twisty and intriguing, I knew I had to read everything else translated into English by this author. And this second book bodes well. Though I didn’t find it as impactful as Malice, this book makes it clear that Higashino likes to play around with format and do new things with story structure in his books (and tone! this book is much less fucked up than Malice was). […]

“It’s true on a technicality. I’m being held unlawfully. I didn’t commit the crime for which I’ve been convicted. But if you look at it another way, I deserve to be here. I did a lot of other shitty things, for which I wasn’t punished.”

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

by Leave a Comment

I wish I would have known this was a retelling of The Brothers Karamazov before I purchased this book and got all excited about it. I probably never would have picked it up. There is a reason that I have never read any of Dostoyevsky’s stuff (or Tolstoy for that matter). The Family Chao follows the titular family, owners of a Chinese restaurant in a small town in America. The parents of the family are immigrants from China, and there are three sons. When the […]

I liked this weird little gremlin book.

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

by Leave a Comment

To be clear, the book isn’t about gremlins, I’m just calling it a gremlin book because it’s weird and small and has claws but is also kind of harmless and laughable in the right light. Also also, gremlin is a fun word to use. This book is impossible to *really* talk about without spoilers, so I’m going to have a pretty big spoiler section and a smaller non-spoiler section in this review. I will try to keep the spoiler section relatively spoiler-free in the sense […]

“This is the year where if you are not careful, you could stand to lose it all. There will be one pregnancy, one funeral, and one marriage. A complete turn around the sun by the next Lunar year. But you must fix your relationship with everyone. And I mean everyone in your family. Starting with your daughters.”

The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh

by Leave a Comment

This was a fun one. The author has said in interviews that she wanted to portray the complexities of Vietnamese American/diaspora relationships between women, and she wanted the women to be messy and make mistakes and have a really hard time not making the same mistakes again and again. So she wrote about a family of cursed Vietnamese women! From the blurb: “Everyone in Orange County’s Little Saigon knew that the Duong sisters were cursed. It started with their ancestor, Oanh, who dared to leave […]

A book about butts!

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

by Leave a Comment

This was a fun book, just as the cover and (extremely good) title promised. Butts: A Backstory is a cultural microhistory of the butt that pretty much covers every aspect of it that you would want or expect it to. We start with the evolutionary purpose of the butt and then move on to such topics as: Sarah Baartman (“The Hottentot Venus”, and why everything about what happened to her and even that moniker is super racist and tragic); the impact of butts on fashion […]

“Desire was not passion and passion was not love.”

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

by Leave a Comment

I have been slow to jump on the Silvia Moreno-Garcia bandwagon, mostly because I read one of her earlier books and it wasn’t for me. Then everyone lost their minds over Mexican Gothic. And I did nothing! But I’m glad I eventually gave her another shot, because this book shows me that I can like what she does, though it still didn’t perfectly gel with my tastes. SM-G is a genre hopping author, and with The Beautiful Ones, she takes on a fantastical version of […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo