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.

 

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

The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani

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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

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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 […]

Together we can be worth more than the sum of our parts

Grown Women by Sarai Johnson

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Sarai Johnson teaches writing and literature courses at Howard and American Universities in the DC Area, and apparently wrote Grown Women, her first novel, in her free time. In my free time I do things like sleep, or sit around and do nothing, or make lists of things I should be doing. Okay okay, I also read the product of other people’s free time. Which bring us full circle to Grown Women, a novel about four generations of women, with the story beginning in 1974 […]

“I’m such a loser in the game of life.”

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady

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I could not put this book down. Frank Brady’s Endgame covers the entirety of Bobby Fischer’s life, from his youth to his unglamorous end. Fischer is presented as a magnetic character, simultaneously pulling and repelling friends, opponents, and the public at large. Had Fischer not had his caustic personality, it is hard to imagine how high he could’ve ascended in his mastery of chess. However, he did have a caustic personality, as well as a hateful belief system, and a fascination with younger women. Outside of […]

“What is the correct collective noun for us..? Maybe ‘a repugnance of twats’ is most apt?”

The Twat Files by Dawn French

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I am a big fan of British humor, whether on TV, film or the page. While I haven’t seen a lot of the French-Saunders comedy team’s sketch work, I know who they are. I am more familiar with Jennifer Saunders due to Ab Fab, but I was aware that Dawn French had a series called The Vicar of Dibley and I recognized her as “The Fat Lady” in the HP movie franchise. French has written several books, and this latest one The Twat Files got […]

Life is always happening and has happened and will happen

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

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One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman? Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why […]



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