Cannonball Read 18

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.

 

“Being duped contaminates your entire sense of self.”

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

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For full disclosure (which feels extra important when discussing a book about deception) I did not finish this book. I made it to the halfway point and realized that the structure of the book wasn’t working for me, and I didn’t want to pick it back up. So, I didn’t.   Now, with that in mind, the reason I believe I felt that way was the way Abby Ellin blended the personal narrative of her lived experience being engaged to a con man with the research about deception through double lives and false […]

Surprisingly, her utter lack of brains or personality is not her “Defect”

Conform by Ariel Sullivan

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Oh my god, this book. There are so many ways someone could have taken this premise and done something with it but it would have required some world building that makes sense. Or a protagonist that isn’t a wet blanket but also the most special girl to ever live. Supposedly Emeline is 27 but I would have just as easily believed she was a pod person created the day before the book started. This is a society built on class and eugenics. The very top […]

Helpless by Jessica Knoll

Helpless by Jessica Knoll

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I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review. Look, this will be short. This was a terrible book. I really enjoyed Knoll’s other books so I kept re-checking what I was reading to make sure that I had not made a mistake somewhere. This was somehow worse than Fifty Shades of Grey. Worse. I didn’t even know that was possible. And then there’s mysteries tied all together (poorly) a main character who is just aggravating and then pointless sex […]

At least now I know where the term “Whirling Dervish” comes from

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

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That’s the most positive thing I can come up with about this book. What a slog this was.  The plot: Ella Rubinstein is a forty year old stay at home mother to two children and a possibly perpetually unfaithful husband. She takes up a job with a publishing house to revise a novel called Sweet Blasphemy by a man named Aziz Zahara. As she reads the novel, she becomes fascinated by the story of the novel, about the friendship between renowned 13th century poet Rumi […]

“Maybe I never needed to change in order to justify my existence”

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

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CBR18Bingo: Summer, because it was the first book I finished this summer. Meditations for Mortals opens with the line, “This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out.” Rather than offering a system guaranteed to optimize your life and change you into the ideal version of yourself, the book’s stated goal is to teach you how to live a meaningful life in the messy imperfection of reality. I picked it up after seeing […]

Have Yourself a Merry Little Night Court

A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas

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This is the fourth in the ACOTAR series and hits the novella category rather than a novel. The plot, such that it is, it pretty much boils down to Feyre and Friends Go Christmas shopping. Winter Solstice is approaching in the Night Court. There’s plenty of drinking, eating and exchanging of gifts. It’s a really lovely little slice of life novella, offering a glimpse of what Feyre’s immortal year might look like when she’s not busy saving the world. From a driving-the-story-forward perspective, I guess […]



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