Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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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.

 

How does your island grow?

Stranded!: A Mostly True Story from Iceland by ÆVar þÓr Benediktsson

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CBR15Passport other country (Iceland) What would you do if you were stranded on a brand new, active volcano?  Well, I do not know about you, but I do not think I would fall asleep like the two characters of ÆVar þÓr Benediktsson’s book, Stranded!: A Mostly True Story from Iceland did. You see, back in the mid-to-late 1960s a volcano was created off the coast of Iceland. This brand-new island was really hot stuff (literally)! It was still flowing molten lava to the point if you […]

Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

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The last book I reviewed for this site was Janice Hallett’s The Appeal, in which most of the characters were involved with an amateur production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Though it was clearly tangential to the plot and unnecessary to parse the mystery, I was still a tad embarrassed to be unfamiliar with the play. So I decided to rectify that. Miller’s play tells the story of two families, the Kellers and the Deevers, who used to be next-door neighbors. The fathers were […]

How Am I Just Learning This Now?!

Period Power by Maisie Hill

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Best for: Anyone who menstruates and wants to know how they can use their cycle to their advantage. In a nutshell: Author Hill looks at different aspects of one’s menstrual cycle, as well as different challenges and complications people face and how to possibly address them. Worth quoting: “The mental switch you need to make is to realise that your feelings here are very real and have nothing to do with your hormones, but your hormones are helping you to give voice to them, and […]

An intimate portrait of the life of a polar bear

Ice Walker by James Raffan

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Non-fiction disguised as fiction. Plot: Nanu is a polar bear fresh from a miscarriage because she hadn’t packed on enough weight last summer to carry her pregnancy to term. We follow her from feeding herself, mating, hibernation, pregnancy, and taking care of her cubs, all while the ice gets thinner, the food less plentiful, and the growing danger from humans. Raffan started his career in the hard sciences and bailed real quick after he saw the kind of things you had to do to science […]

Outland- Escapist Apocalypse

Outland by Dennis E. Taylor

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When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it’s up to six college students and their experimental physics project to prevent the end of civilization. When an experiment to study quantum uncertainty goes spectacularly wrong, physics student Bill Rustad and his friends find that they have accidentally created an inter-dimensional portal. They connect to Outland—an alternate Earth with identical geology, but where humans never evolved. The group races to establish control of the portal before the government, the military, or evildoers can take it away. Then everything changes […]

Pest? A Matter of Perception

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire

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  What defines a pest, really? What makes one animal seen as a loveable little critter that we want to share our space with and the other an irredeemable menace marked for eradication?  In Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, Bethany Brookshire attempts to answer this question by giving us a cultural history of our relationship with these species we deem ‘pest-y’ and what makes us so quick to assign them a villainous role.   One of things that really stood out to me is […]



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