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.

 

Black Cover and Maybe Some Black Hearts or not so Black

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

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Bingo 19: Black Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar has a cover almost entirely in the proper color. Mostly, this is a story about people who want things they think they either cannot or should not have. Luiza is part Jewish (dangerous during the Inquisition) and has some minor household magic; her milagritos are things like she can make the bread unburnt. She wants to be something more than the scullery maid; she wants better, more money, more comfort, just more. There’s also her boss Valentina who […]

Norse inspired marriage of convenience

Tears of the Wolf by Elisabeth Wheatley

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I wouldn’t have said that I was on Norse or Viking kick this year and yet this is somehow the fifth Viking/Nordic inspired fantasy novel I have read this year (three of them were part of the same trilogy, though, The Bloodsworn). I discovered Elisabeth Wheatley because her book goblin reels/videos kept showing up in my feed, and then I realized she wasn’t just a fellow reader and book lover but an author so I decided to try her latest release (there’s a sequel coming […]

The movie scared me so bad it took 20 years to read the book.

Ring by Koji Suzuki

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This movie played a significant role in my life 20 years ago. I was a huge cinephile, and watched movies all the time. I don’t remember the exact sequence that led to me watching it for the first time, but this was the movie to watch if you were a fan of horror movies in the early 2000s. there was a florescence in Japanese horror that was kicked off by this movie, which, in turn, influenced movies being made around the world. And I enjoyed […]

So easy even Humans can get them

Physics for Cats by Tom Gauld

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Do you know anything about physics? Well, if you are a more serious provider of this particular knowledge, you might not want to read Physics for Cats by Tom Gauld because there is not a lot of seriousness going on. Then again, maybe you need a bit of humor to get you through the bumps, bruises and teenage robots of your chosen field. The point of things is that there is humor in anything. Including physics. Including the crazy world we live in. Including pretty […]

Hubris and the British Empire, a Match Made in Heaven

Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin

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Erebus tells the story of the eponymous ship, part of the British Imperial navy at the height of its power. Though it was originally meant for combat, it was used for exploration – polar exploration, to be precise. It was first sailed to the south pole by James Clark Ross, with its sister ship HMS Terror, for a very successful exploration: geographical landmarks still bear their names (Mount Terror and Mount Erebus). However, the ships’ glory came to an abrupt halt several years later in […]

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]



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