Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fables & Reflections

Fables & Reflections by Neil Gaiman

by Leave a Comment

Trigger warning: Rape I liked this one though Dream feels like a bit player in most of these stories. There’s is a darkness in all of these stories though. I don’t know which one affected me the most, probably the story of Augustus Caesar. I am going to rate these stories separately since they really do feel like a series of short stories that are just taking place in the world of The Sandman. “Fear of Falling” (3.5 stars)-Not a bad start. We all have […]

I Am in Actual Awe

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas

by 7 Comments

Bryce Quinlan lives a charmed life in Crescent City, despite her dubious status as a half-human citizen of the Empire. But all that changes when her best friend is murdered viciously. Now, two years later, she discovers that most everything she believed about that murder may be a lie. I will go on record about this; I am eating my words. A few years ago, on the recommendation of my sister, I started reading the Throne of Glass series. I thought the first book was […]

“Her bouts of bitchiness were really starting to grow on him, which just proved how in over his head he was.”

Neon Gods by Katee Robert

by Leave a Comment

There is just something magical about taking well known stories with timid, two dimensional women that are little more than plot devices and retelling them with a recast woman that has her own motivations and personality. Even when they’re not perfect, they’re still good. Plot: Persephone has been playing the biddable daughter to bide her time so she can escape Olympus and its political machinations forever when her mother all but sells her to Zeus to be his new Hera. The problem is that the […]

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”

Midnight Library by Matt Haig

by Leave a Comment

It’s a Wonderful Life with parallel lives. Plot: Nora Seed is depressed. Suicide ideation depressed. In a matter of a day, she loses her pretty crummy job, her cat, and a connection to a neighbor she thought was a sort of friend. So late that night, she takes a lot of pills and waits for the end. She closes her eyes and when they open, which is already a surprise, she finds herself in a vast library staffed by her old school librarian. And the […]

“I never stopped trying to save you, so don’t you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.”

A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1) by Alix E. Harrow

by Leave a Comment

A Spindle Splintered is a queer retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, playing on the variations that exist and adding one of its own. The basic story has been around for almost seven hundred years and has flown through the hands of Basile, Perrault, and Grimm, and that’s before we get into the hundreds of adaptations so what’s another? Harrow brings her own lens to this, and imbues her lead, Zinnia Grey, with a wonderfully clear voice. It is so realistic that I initially thought […]

Magic City, Magic Boroughs

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

by Leave a Comment

If you love New York City, as I do, you’ll love this book as much as I did (my favorite read of 2022 so far by far). Let’s just start there. Like author N.K. Jemisin, I’m an NYC transplant, even if she had more experience visiting it in her youth than I did. Like her, I came with an understanding and expectation of what I thought the city was and was going to be for me. And, according to the afterword, I learned and changed […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo