Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

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.

 

A Tale of Two Second Chances

Rewind it Back by Liz Tomforde

Left of Forever by Tarah DeWitt

by Leave a Comment

This year, two of my favourite romance authors were slated to release new books with the same central conceit: a second chance romance. Lucky for me, it’s one of my favourite tropes. Unluckily for me, I am very picky about it. Both books, Tarah DeWitt’s Left of Forever and Liz Tomforde’s Rewind it Back also happened to come out on the same day, so I was comparing the two even before I had either in my hands. Thankfully for me, I enjoyed both of them, […]

“The economy’s in ruins, no one’s got a job, and we just don’t care, it’s bliss.”

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

by 1 Comment

It’s 1983. Thatcher is at No. 10 and Nick Guest, age 21, has just graduated from Oxford University. He finds himself as a lodger at the house of a college friend, Toby, whose father Gerald Fedden has been elected as a promising new conservative MP. Nick, who comes from a solidly middle class background, finds himself a loose thread intricately woven into the upper class social fabric of the Freddens. Nick has the wrong background and the wrong predilections, and he knows it doesn’t take […]

La Parisienne

The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola

Nana by Émile Zola

by Leave a Comment

The Ladies’ Paradise – 4 stars Denise Baudu comes dirt-poor to Paris with her younger brothers to work at her uncle’s shop, but instead goes to work at its greatest competitor – the ever-growing department store the Ladies’ Paradise, presided over by the Great Seducer Octave Mouret, who falls in love with Denise only to find out she may be one of the only things in the world he cannot buy. I was in the mood for a Victorian novel, but none of the usual […]

Literary fiction that I actually liked

Flashlight by Susan Choi

by Leave a Comment

The Book: It’s kind of hard to say what Flashlight is about. The summary makes it sound almost like a mystery: Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach, and hours later, she is found soaking wet and half-drowned, and he is nowhere to be found and presumed drowned. But most of the book is less concerned with this mystery than with the complicated family dynamics at play between the four main characters. Louisa’s father, Serk, is Korean, although he was born in […]

I read a young adult book on India’s partition and felt like my heart was absolutely shredded

The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani

by 4 Comments

The world is burning at the moment, and we may be hyper focused on the US trying to gun for the “Most Likely to Revert to a Dictatorship” award or Israel’s decision to start double-fisting wars or (literally happened today) US’s decision to join the Iran-Israel conflict — but do you know that WWIII came very close to breaking out in May? India and Pakistan — both nuclear-armed, and both sworn enemies since the Brits left — started bombing each other over militant attacks in […]

Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim

by 4 Comments

I’m fudging a little bit: this isn’t a book, it’s a short story. It’s an absolutely outstanding short story  however. It’s based on a story by Ursula K. LeGuin and expands on it in ways that made me want to go and read the original. Were I not locked joyfully within the Dungeon Crawler Carl universe so completely that I plan to start a reread the moment I finish book 7, I would. As it is I’ll have to wait. Why Don’t We Just Kill the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo