Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Natalie Naudus saved me on this one.

Heart of the Sun Warrior (The Celestial Kingdom Duology, #2) by Sue Lynn Tan

by Leave a Comment

Last year I got into a really bad habit of not only buying pretty much every first book in a series that looked good to me, but oftentimes buying the sequel as well. That is what I did for this series. I was so convinced I would love it, I overcommitted. When I finally got around to reading the first book, Daughter of the Moon Goddess, in January, I had a tough time getting through it. Something about the pacing and the writing style did […]

We can’t go faster than light but maybe spacetime can!?

The Science of Sci-Fi: From Warp Speed to Interstellar Travel by Erin Macdonald

by Leave a Comment

This year is my “No-Buy Year,” so I’m trying (and mostly succeeding!) to cut way back on buying books in any form. I already have so many that I haven’t read! So right now I’m going through a backlog of Audible books on my now-defunct account. (I switched to Libro.fm last year to support local indie bookstores with my audiobook purchases. Highly recommend!) A benefit of the No-Buy Year is rediscovering the myriad things you previously thought highly enough of to purchase, but then shortly […]

An intimate portrait of the life of a polar bear

Ice Walker by James Raffan

by 1 Comment

Non-fiction disguised as fiction. Plot: Nanu is a polar bear fresh from a miscarriage because she hadn’t packed on enough weight last summer to carry her pregnancy to term. We follow her from feeding herself, mating, hibernation, pregnancy, and taking care of her cubs, all while the ice gets thinner, the food less plentiful, and the growing danger from humans. Raffan started his career in the hard sciences and bailed real quick after he saw the kind of things you had to do to science […]

“You really named her ‘Linnea’?” “Linnea’s a survivor.” “She dies in every movie.” “Her characters do, but she goes from movie to movie,” Letha says. “She never dies.”

Don't Fear the Reaper (The Lake Witch Trilogy, #2) by Stephen Graham Jones

by Leave a Comment

So this was a really good book! But it had extremely large shoes to fill. My expectations weren’t that high for it, but only because I purposefully set them low knowing that living up to the genius that was My Heart is a Chainsaw was just going to be a really tall order. I feel like I need to re-read both this one and the first one pretty soon and take it slowly, and tab and annotate, because I got in my own way here. […]

“We can drown in regret.”

The Theory of Crows by David A Robertson

by Leave a Comment

A powerful story of community, of family, and of the hard work of forgiveness. Plot: Matthew is stuck inside of a crippling depression that has plagued him his whole life. He used to be able to play the part of a happy person, a person present for his wife and daughter, but the last few years it has swallowed him whole. This has meant that he has stopped seeing his family, stopped knowing how to connect to them, and they in turn and grown to […]

“And they all liv’d together in a little crooked house.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

by Leave a Comment

Ooh, I got really into this one. It’s been a month since I’ve finished so I’ve had some time to think (though I do of course wish I’d written the review right away, but alas) and I think the reason that I loved this one so much is that it’s one of the few non-detective mystery novels to get the mystery part right and have it be believable. A lot of the time, as a mystery fan when encountering books with non-detective main characters, there […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo