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.

 

“They lead ‘still’ lives, waiting.”

Still Life by Louise Penny

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My husband and I started watching the Three Pines series on Amazon Prime, which was enjoyable; Chief Inspector Gamache, played by Alfred Molina, is a delight of eyebrows. The television series reminded me that I likely hadn’t read Ms. Penny’s earlier works though I have picked up the occasional book in an airport bookstore but have moved haphazardly through the series; thus, I decided to start at the first book. Sill Life draws Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec to the delightfully bucolic […]

The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

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Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s powerful, 1962 non-fiction book documenting the damage caused by widespread and indiscriminate use of pesticides, has been on my TBR for a long time. I considered it something I simply had to read if I was going to continue to claim to be a science lover and environmentalist. I thought this would mostly be review for me since I’m already aware of the harm that DDT has caused. For one thing, I’m involved with an organization that supports conservation efforts around […]

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 […]



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