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.

 

Delicately unpacking a whole lot of emotional baggage

Just a Highland Fling by Naina Kumar

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There was a point in Just a Highland Fling where Neelu is in the car with her estranged father and her one night stand antagonist, and I thought, “no one handles emotional baggage like Naina Kumar.” Highland Fling is a lot of fun. I enjoyed it enormously. It’s a good road trip romance with forced proximity, sheep, daddy issues, and a hot Desi bagpiper/poetry professor. What I really loved though was the way Kumar handled big raw feelings and their fallout with delicacy. Neelu is […]

Everything I’ve done since losing you has been about getting back to you.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

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CBR18 Bingo: Maps – Kite and Joe follow and escape from the war by attacking and fleeing different harbours all over Europe. He put his hand out and Kite shook it. Joe had the alien thought that people here must never have touched each other otherwise. There was no kiss, no hug, nothing. They were all oysters sealed in their stiff manners. ― Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms I tried to let you go, before. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d forget so quickly. ― Natasha […]

“We are burning and we are falling / and we are stuck”

New Arcana by Jessica Traynor

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CBR 18 Bingo: FRIENDS Back in mid-March, I was like, “Life is leveling out! I can write reviews again!” And then my beloved 16-year-old dog, not two weeks later, passed away. And I did not write any reviews, obviously. I’m not going to tempt the fates again by suggesting life is leveling out. Life is happening. Here I am. I’ve been reading books all this time, and I want to write about them again. Let’s see if I can do it. I started Jessica Traynor’s New […]

Billionaire reform starts with a good book

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

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The Uncommon Reader is a little hard to classify — I guess it’s alternate history? — but the premise is essentially that Elizabeth II happens upon a bookmobile, starts reading a lot, and Is Changed. This is a book for book lovers, and specifically, for deepish Anglo-biased “classic” catalog readers (George Eliot, Nancy Mitford, EM Forster … but also some non-Anglo authors e.g. Vikram Seth, Tolstoy). Like, if you read Ready Player One and your reaction was “this is not for me, this is for […]

bingo means time to hit the backlog…

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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CBR Bingo: One, for Austen’s first book! Whilst watching the superlatively wonderful Emma Thompson/Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility on a very successful (if I say so myself) Book Group On Tour weekend in Bristol, it occured to me that I’d never read the actual novel on which it was based. Looking to rectify this, I procured this copy at a local bookstore and then proceeded to gnash my teeth over it for what feels like AGES but probably was only a week or so? This was Austen’s […]

The Trumps of Doom

Trumps of Doom by Roger Zelazny

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It’s interesting that this is one of the Amber books that’s stayed in my mind the most, but that I don’t actually remember very well. I’m mostly confident of this because I remember… none of it. In my recollection of reading these stories as a teenager, I can at least remember that there’s a final battle between the Amberites and the forces of Chaos, but the specifics of that are so different. They’re also not very impressive, though this may be unfair because the Ice […]



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