Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Featured Review Archive

These reviews, which were promoted in CBR social media, on our homepage, and in Pajiba Love, appear below by review publication date, not by date featured.

 

“He flopped sideways, mute testament to the greatest fighting technique of all: a friend behind your enemy.”

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

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The Devils is my first Abercrombie book. I’ve had Half a King on my TBR for over a decade, but it hadn’t made its way onto an annual list yet. But as is often the case over the past many years narfna reviewed something ecstatically which had me checking to see if it fit a reading challenge (I’m counting this as weird horror for Read Harder and Black for CBR Bingo) and then it made its way to this year’s list.  My brain is tired having finished the nearly 550 pages of this book. But the good kind of tired. The “I just […]

“Let me enjoy my vampire romance nonsense in peace.”

ZomRomCom by Olivia Dade

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“Do you ever read anything serious?” Good grief, Susan. Have you seen the state of the world lately? Let me enjoy my vampire romance nonsense in peace. -Random Facebook meme   The apocalypse is coming! Oh wait, it already happened. A decade ago, Zombies were loosed upon the Earth and they ate a LOT of people. Edie Brandstrup survived, but her parents did not. Now she is a forty-something (yeah!), plus-sized (HELL YEAH!) soap maker, who lives next door to a dude-bro named Chad (Boo!). […]

The Wheel (spinning) of Time

The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan

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Book four of The Wheel of Time is where I began to have some doubts about finishing this series. I knew going in that I was setting myself up to real fourteen books, which is more than I have done for any other series. Though I found the first book, The Eye of the World, to be derivative (of Lord of the Rings and Arthurian legend in particular) at times I enjoyed the story and characters enough to continue on. The second novel, The Great […]

As Slippery as a Fish

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan

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“Billy Gould could not escape the growing suspicion that he had become entrapped in a book, a character whose future as much as his past was already written, determined, foretold, as unalterable as it was intolerable. What choice did he have but to destroy that book?”   I’ve saved the most flummoxing book of the year for the last square on the bingo board: a book which involves metafiction and magical realism in convict-era Tasmania. Thanks, Richard Flanagan. Gould’s Book of Fish has a convoluted […]

Should A Classic Be Discounted Because of the Racist Origins of its First Title?

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

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As a teenager, I was a huge Agatha Christie fan. There’s a reason she ranks among the most widely published authors of all time (behind only Shakespeare). The lady can spin a yarn! I’m proud to say I guessed the murderer in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd when I first read it, though I recently reread And Then There Were None and did not guess said murderer. (I haven’t read the book in twenty-plus years, so it feels brand-new). The title has been changed twice […]

The National Pastime in a Past Time

Electric October by Kevin Cook

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If the 1947 World Series had been an uneventful contest, it still would have held two historic distinctions. Most importantly, it was the first World Series featuring black players. Rookie of the Year Jackie Robinson was a big reason the Brooklyn Dodgers won the pennant. (The Dodgers also had a second Black player, Dan Bankhead, but he had been an ineffective relief pitcher late in the season and was only used as a pinch-runner in the World Series.) Secondly, it was the first World Series […]



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