Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

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.

 

Not what I expected; Exactly what I expected

Night's Fall by Kristen Ashley

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Oh, gentle reader… I thought I had broken myself of the Kristen Ashley habit. Longtime Cannonball Read participants will remember my earlier addiction to her books and my lamentations over them. And by lamentations, I mean my lamenting over my inability to quit reading books that made me want to scream in frustration over the way the female main characters were inevitably told to just get over bad behaviors by the male main characters due to their possessive, protective feelings about said female. I’m jerk […]

“…looking back at those pages, I shivered to see our plunge into darkness, day by day, without realizing it was a spiral, and its nadir, the abyss.”

The Year of the Wind: A Novel by Karina Pacheco Medrano

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Cbr18bingo Sheep. Sheep and other livestock are mentioned throughout the novel and sheep feature prominently in a particularly important scene Earlier in the year I reviewed Rabih Alameddine’s brilliant novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) and one of the things I noted in my review is that the narrator, who is a few years older than I am, describes growing up in Lebanon and Beirut in the 1970s/80s. I was in high school and college at that time, and […]

Everyone but the chihuahua is a suspect

The Sleeping Sisters by Jennifer Givhan

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CBR18 Bingo – Or: I can read about violence against women or… violence against women. I started The Bone Thief by Vanessa Lillie when I decided I wasn’t up for a mystery so dependent on real world violence against indigenous women and people. Then I jumped into this book like an idiot because I liked the cover. It was too late to go back by the time I realized Jennifer Givhan’s The Sleeping Sisters was inspired by the unsolved West Mesa Murders. I was hooked […]

Silvia Moreno-Garcia does noir as well as you think she would – brilliantly

The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno Garcia

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Ulises Linares (not his real name) is a conman who engages in lonely hearts and romance cons. At almost 30, and after the death of his father, he’s feeling a pressure to pull a con that will give him some stability. He decides to pursue Perla Inclan, a woman whose family once owned a reasonably successful coffee company in Puerco Ahogado (which means “drowned pig”), in the mountains of Veracruz. But Perla is no easy mark. And her niece, Inés, clocks him pretty quickly. The […]

Holiday Roundup

A Short Stay in Hell by Stephen L. Peck

System Collapse (Murderbot #7) by Martha Wells

Tough Guy (Game Changers #4) by Rachel Reid

Flesh by David Szalay

The Heir Affair by Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan

Last One Out by Jane Harper

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Here’s what I read while I was camping in France. It was very hot. I may have melted a few times. It was way too hot for complicated stuff, so for unrelated reasons: here’s a picture of a hotel that’s for sale in the charming, medieval town of Brancion in the Bourgogne for anyone contemplating a career change. Say hi to the former caretaker’s wife; she was very friendly.  Anyway, here’s what I read.  A Short Stay in Hell (Stephen L. Peck) **** A man, […]

I Would Not Survive in 1855…And I Wouldn’t Want To

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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We meet bright, but cold Natalie Heller as she goes off to Harvard. Instead of experiencing the world, making friends and learning, the experience shows her that what she knows is “right” and that the world is wicked. She meets a man, a man who’s family is wealthy and heavily connected to politics and she sees in him someone she can mold and make the perfect husband. They quickly marry and things immediately go downhill. Natalie loathes her husband. He has no ambition, he wants […]



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