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.

 

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang

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Format in which I consumed this book: audiobook Did I like it/love it/hate it? Loved it What’s it about? Helen is a successful YA author whose book series is being turned into a tv show. She will be one of the show’s writers despite the fact she has no television experience. Grant is one of the head writers on the show. He knows Helen from high school, but not for good reasons. Grant happened to be driving the vehicle that Helen’s younger sister threw herself […]

Broadway Through the Decades

Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway by Michael Riedel

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Fittingly for a book about Broadway, Razzle Dazzle takes a big swing. It’s an incredibly ambitious project, covering a wide span of territory, in time if not geography. Geographically, Riedel’s main focus is on a slice of West 44th Street known as Shubert Alley. That’s where the Shubert Organization, owners of seventeen Broadway theaters, conduct their business. Founded as a family business by Sam Shubert and his younger brothers Lee and J.J., the company had many up and down periods under their control, which formally […]

Could Not Stop Reading It

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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Rating: 4.5 In a nutshell: Natalie is a tradwife influencer with five kids and one on the way. She lives on a farm and posts on social media about her life (keeping the two nannies and many farmhands off screen, of course). One morning she wakes up and finds herself still on the farm, but her children are different and it appears to be some time in the 1800s. Is she dreaming? Is she part of some sort of reality show? What is happening? Best […]

The (No Spoilers) Spoils of Poynton

The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James

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The Spoils of Poynton … should have been a short story rather than a novel. One can (almost) see the whole plot in the first few chapters. The simple set-up is this – Mrs. Gereth has lovingly and carefully collected art and antiques her entire adult married life with her husband. After his death it is discovered that Mr. Gereth has bequeathed the whole kit and caboodle, along with the stately home she has lived in her entire married life, to their only son Owen, […]

No, but really, everything is connected

Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. Kendi

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Conspiracy theories hit differently depending on where you live in the world. The more outlandish ones; the moon landings were faked, we’re all being ruled by lizard people with orange fake tan; live in the West. In most of the Global South, conspiracy theories about government coups aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re just reality seen through a different lens. Ibram X Kendi’s Chain of Ideas feels a little reading about the Lizard People before you realise that, no, this IS how the far-right have come back […]

“Hell is a campus.”

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

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What do you do when your graduate advisor dies, but you still need a letter of recommendation? Apparently, you travel to Hell to retrieve his soul and his recommendation along with it. Rivals Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are Cambridge graduate students studying Magick. When a spell gone awry kills their advisor, Professor Grimes, they decide they have no choice but to journey to the underworld to save their academic careers. What follows reads like an homage to Dante’s Inferno, if Dante had been a […]



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