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.

 

“Don’t worry about any of this stuff, okay? It’s all just adult junk that doesn’t mean anything.”

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki, Jillian Tamaki

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This One Summer is a re-read for me. It is also the book I have read in the past few years specifically from the Banned Book List put out by the ALA that makes me scratch my head the most. It is because this is the book that hit #1 most challenged in 2016 and was why I read it in 2017. It then came back to the top ten in 2018. It did not make sense to me then, and it makes little sense […]

And What Comes After Bans?

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

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Read as part of CBR15bingo: gender and banned. Maia Kobabe is a non-binary writer whose book Gender Queer has been banned at many schools and libraries across the country.  It almost made perfect sense that when I saw I had to read a banned book on gender for this challenge, I’d get to Maia Kobabe’s work. Maia’s book seems to have been the spark that ignited the fires of book banning in Florida. I will not argue that most Americans have a complex understanding of gender. […]

Toni Morrison (1)

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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I was just reading Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar, and she discusses Beloved briefly as a Madea story. This is true in the sense that the plot of Beloved involves Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman now ten or more years after the Civil War, living in a house in Ohio that is haunted by some sort of presence. Sethe too is a quite haunted woman. In a moment of abject fear and panic, some years earlier Sethe kills her infant daughter when she believes that she’s […]

Obscure Sex Fantasies Don’t Have to Make Sense

Reckless Heir by Jenika Snow

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Listen, is this book good? No. Not really. It’s got a weird obsession with a particularly Victorian idea of virginity, and only the loosest possible concept of the physical logistics of real human sex. It’s distracting. These people need, like, so much sex ed. And also probably to see several doctors. And then to hire somebody to come and clean ALL of their furniture. But is this book compelling? Yeah, actually. Like, I get it. Until somewhat recently, I really didn’t see the appeal of […]

Aliens with doughnuts

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

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CBR square- Queer Lives. What a lovely, absorbing, moving book. I really loved Light From Uncommon Stars, the Hugo nominated book from Ryka Aoki. It’s about a transgender girl named Katrina who runs away from her abusive home and runs towards Shizuka Satomi, a woman who has made a bargain with a demon to bring seven souls to Hell in order for people to know her music again. She plays the violin and so does Katrina. Once she hears Katrina play she knows she is […]

And now I’ll be humming “Brazil” for the rest of the day

Dom Casmurro by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

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CBR15 BINGO: South America, because Machado de Assis is one of Brazil’s most famous and beloved writers Note: The version I read is a translation by Margaret Jill Costa and Robin Patterson, published in 2023. Note #2: Shout out to my husband, Peter, for recommending this author to me! One of the best things about CBR BINGO is that it prompts me to read books that might otherwise languish on my TBR, such as Dom Casmurro, by Joaquin Maria Machado de Assis. Checking back on […]



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