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.

 

Shifters, fairies, bake offs, oh myyyy

The Alpha and the Baker by Roxie Ray

by 2 Comments

Y’all, when I tell you this delightfully sweet and sexy bon bon of a novel is everything I needed to take my mind off of [insert Kermit flail here] everything. I just didn’t know it when I started The Alpha and the Baker by Roxie Ray this morning. Castiel McAllister*, known by one and all as Cas, is a golden retriever of an alpha wolf shifter. Nary a grunt or assholery behavior to be found, only a desire for his pack to be safe, healthy […]

Short and sweet, with great illustrations

The Dragon of Og by Rumer Godden

by 1 Comment

Our 2025 read-aloud journey continues! I found this one thanks to a list along the lines of, “If you liked The Hobbit…” We read it in one afternoon (it’s very short), and both kids give it two thumbs up. The titular dragon has a lovely home under a pool in a river belonging to Lord of Tundergarth, a home found for him by his thoughtful mother. He is a shy, quiet dragon who eats only one bullock every 2 or 3 weeks, from the cattle […]

“I love that the vagueness of “we lost our receptionist” implies he quit, died, or wandered into the woods where no one could find him.”

What Happens in Amsterdam by Rachel Lynn Solomon

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A first rate second chance romance. Plot: Dani is a late bloomer. Dealing with severe health issues as a kid has left her parents overprotective and her world was narrowed to meeting her physical needs, but others’ emotional needs. Still, after a bad breakup and a job loss, she finds herself taking on an opportunity to work for a start up in Amsterdam, an ocean away from her loving but controlling parents. Unfortunately, her cloistered childhood has left her without some necessary real world skills, […]

Delightful, entertaining, and informative

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

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CBR17Bingo: Migrant (because Australia is a country of migrants–beginning with the Aboriginals and their mysterious journey by ship thousands of years ago, to the first European migrants, to the current migrants [almost half of the population of Sydney was born overseas]). My husband and I began a tradition at our first anniversary of finding a book that relates to something we did during the year, and then we both read it. We haven’t been married very long, but we generally choose books about somewhere we […]

Room Mates

Make Room For Love by Darcy Liao

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: Recommendation. This was recommended to me at a romance bookstore when I was looking for sapphic romance tales with trans MCs. We’re in an age where the formerly established fact of multicultural democracy is becoming unsettled. And as such, more stories by gay, queer, trans, enby creatives are going to be going by the wayside. You’ll probably still have “the table” at Barnes & Noble as the bookstore tries to cash in on branding writers by their identity more […]

I read this so you don’t have to

The Bane Witch by Ava Morgyn

by 3 Comments

Warning: I’m going to spoil the shit out of this book because I don’t want to subject anyone else to it. I don’t normally post truly negative reviews (at worst, my reviews are lukewarm-ish). Most of the time when I don’t like a book, I stop reading it, and usually, it’s because I’m bored (and I don’t usually have much to say beyond “I was bored”, which hardly justifies writing a full review). I wanted to quit this book so many times, but the masochistic […]



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