Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A little Blarney

Three Ways to Trap a Leprechaun by  Tara Lazar

by Leave a Comment

For several years, I have seen or read about books that have children wanting to trap Santa Claus. This time our heroine wants to trap a leprechaun. With the help of her reluctant (and sleepy) brother, we see the science behind creating a trap in Three Ways to Trap a Leprechaun. This is not a St. Patrick’s Day book, or even one that only people of Irish decent would appreciate (though I for one appreciated the blarney and cheek of the leprechaun in question). This […]

What a lovely creature you are.

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley

by Leave a Comment

This is a hard book to review or it may be that this is a hard time for me to write a review. I thought that reading would be a refuge for me as we self isolate but concentrating enough to fall into a story hasn’t been easy for me. Oddly, I’m leaning more towards exercise, of all things, stress cleaning, playing Wordscapes and Scrabble on my phone and making meal plans based on the miscellaneous foodstuffs in my house. BUT…if there ever was a story to […]

Time for some magitech

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

by Leave a Comment

The Rivers of London series is one of my favourites being a London based urban fantasy centring around DC Peter Grant, a copper who back in the first book got himself mixed up in magic and seconded to the Metropolitan Police’s covet magic division “The Folly”. We’re now at the eighth full length novel in an increasing detailed series – we have offshoots in other countries (The October Man in Germany), graphic novels, and a sense of a slowly building world in which magic is […]

A bit of a Carry On…

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

by Leave a Comment

The premise of this book intrigued me with it being a full story set in a pseudo-Harry Potter world dreamed up to be a novel series in another book (Fangirl) whose protagonist wrote fan fiction. So it’s a fictionalisation of a book series that was Harry Potter with the numbers filed off. And our lead characters here are Harry & Draco archetypes (called Simon and Baz) with the idea being that in the Fangirl-verse everyone wanted them to be in a relationship rather than enemies. […]

Another Cinderella Story

Sootypaws: A Cinderella Story by Maggie Rudy

by Leave a Comment

I have organized the picture book reader copies several times recently (for various reasons). And I kept going around this book. I did not want to even touch it. Not that I have an issue with mice or even rats, but dead mice/rats are another thing and these cover critters looked dead. Never mind the fact that it seemed like it could be a fun alternative Cinderella story. I like alternative fairy tales and Cinderella stories in particular. I used to have a collection of […]

Who Can Truly Know Her When There Are No Others Of Her Kind?

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathon Snipes

by Leave a Comment

Rivers Solomon’s The Deep is a beautiful and gut wrenching novella. At this current time, I don’t think I could have read it if I hadn’t listened to Daveed Diggs’ narration. Diggs and his fellow clppng’s William Hutson and Jonathon Snipes, hold author credits because the novella is based a song they wrote, commissioned by NPR’s This American Life for “We Are in the Future” an episode about Afrofuturism. Clppng’s song was an homage to Detroit’s Drexciya who imagined an underwater utopia created by the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo