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.

 

“every death is significant, even when every life appears not to be”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

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I am exhausted: extremely jet-lagged and just submitted materials for my first major deadline of 2023. So what better to do than to review the last book I read in 2022 (finished at approximately 9:30 PM on New Year’s Eve, yes I know how to party), the Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida? 2022 was actually my best year when it comes to attacking the Booker longlist; I read three of the nominees, and all of them were really excellent novels, in extremely divergent ways. […]

The Queer Family Stone

Kiss Her Once For Me by Alison Cochrun

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This is a bit of a delayed Christmas romcom review, both due to the large hold list for it through the Twin Cities-area Libby library and because I utterly fell down on actually reviewing books for CBR 14. Ellie Oliver is a failed animation artist turned webcomic writer and barista. She’s stuck in life and hung up on a one-day snowstorm fling she had over Christmas the year before so when Andrew Kim-Prescott, the landlord of the coffee shop she works at, asks him to […]

“If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.” Luke Skywalker

Star Wars: Exploring Tatooine - An Illustrated Guide by Riley Silverman

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When the first Star Wars movie came out in May 1977, I was 8 years old. I don’t know why I went to see it. I was horrifying my parents with my love of Charlie’s Angels (I remember nothing about the plots, only the hair and the costumes). I was entirely earthbound. But somehow I saw the movie and fell in love. My friends and I went from playing Charlie’s Angels to playing Charlie’s Angels in Star Wars (still horrifying my parents with that) because […]

“stand back astonished / stand back and observe”

Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul by Judith Valente, Charles Reynard

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This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it – from Lisel Mueller’s “Alive Together” April is National Poetry Month, so I wanted to squeeze in this review this week. However, I didn’t squeeze in this book. No, I read it over months (years?), coming back and forth to certain poems, picking them up and putting them down to see how they look on different days, in different light. What I […]

A totally different book than I normally read

The Direction of the Wind by Mansi Shah

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I don’t remember how I found this book, but it’s totally not my style. Nobody gets murdered. I was going to say there aren’t even any missing persons or mysteries to solve, but that’s totally not true. I guess it had the undertones of “my style” of book and I didn’t even realize it. We start out with Sophie mourning the loss of her father, who just recently passed away. She’s helping her aunts clean out the house, and she finds some old letters hidden […]

Your life hasn’t even started yet and you’re already lost?

Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi

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CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #5: Books from different countries. Japan.) This one was an adventure for me. I don’t know a lot about Japanese literature or anime, but my kid is a Japanophile. He’s planning to minor in Japanese in college this (gulp) fall and would like to live there for a couple of years at some point (also, gulp). So, I thought of him when I saw this on the “new” bookshelf at the library and decided to give it a whirl. I asked him about it and […]



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