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.

 

Be the funny

Be the Bus: The Lost & Profound Wisdom of the Pigeon. by Mo Willems

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Have you found the word of The Pigeon? Have you taken The Pigeon into your soul and heart? And I do not mean just any ol’ pigeon, but the pigeon of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! If not, you need this handy-dandy little gem called Be the Bus: The Lost & Profound Wisdom of the Pigeon. Mo Willems is at his best when we get sage advice such as Let me be the first to say that everything has already been said. Or […]

The sequel is never as good as the original

The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex by Charles Darwin

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Back in 2020, I finished out the year by reviewing On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Since then, I’ve been trying to motivate myself to work my way through Darwin’s follow up: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Knowing that the ideas in Descent of Man were controversial, Darwin held off publishing until 12 years after Origin of Species. His thoughts on natural selection being well received, however, he felt comfortable proceeding to the next step, namely, “. […]

It’s Not All In My Head

Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun

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Best for: Women at the start of their midlife. In a nutshell: Author Calhoun explores the unique challenges that Gen X women are facing as they enter and continue through midlife. Worth quoting: “But Gen Xers entered life with ‘having it all’ not as a bright new option but as a mandatory social condition.” “The last think we need at this stage of life is self-help…What we need at this stage isn’t more advice, but solace.” Why I chose it: Well, by most accounts I […]

Not your mama’s Wizard of Oz

Dorothy Must Die (Dorothy Must Die book #1) by Danielle Paige

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“[My mother] told me that, whatever anyone at school said, a trailer was where I lived, not who I was. She told me that it was the best home in the world because it could go anywhere.” And what better place to go than the colorful, magical land of Oz? But we learn quickly that this ain’t your mama’s Oz. Dorothy Must Die is the first of a series of novellas about Amy, from…(I’ll give you one guess). She’s in high school with a mother […]

A Few Squirts of a Turkey Baster

Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings by Chrysta Bilton

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CBR15 Passport Challenge: New to you authors #1 Chrysta and her sister are the daughters of a dynamic and damaged woman, a single lesbian who yearned for a child in the rather unaccepting 1980s – and found her ideal sperm donor in a hair salon. But both Debra and Jeffrey hid many secrets from their children. There’s that oft-quoted opening sentence of Anna Karenina – “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I thought of that quote, and how […]

Still in love with Catana Comics

In Love & Pajamas by Catana Chetwynd

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I’ve said before that Catana’s online comic is up there with Peanuts for me as one of my all-time favorites, and so it makes sense that, like Peanuts, she would have the occasional lull where things don’t feel as fresh. This was the only book I got for Christmas, a surprise for me after getting quite a few last year, and my wife’s grandmother, the one who got it for me, was more concerned with why it had stickers and what I’d do with them […]



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