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.

 

Define What You Mean by Vermin

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

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No matter what else has been going on recently, it has at least been a banner year for reading. Forget the top three, I’m going to have so much fun (difficulty) trying to whittle everything down to a top ten list. In the parlance of some of my students, the last few months have given me some absolute bangers.  The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes is absolutely in that catagory. In some ways it feels like a throwback to the New Weird of the […]

My most surprising 5-star read of the year (also Cannonball, finally)

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

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Monthly Keyword 26: Bright Reading the Rainbow: Yellow CBR18 Bingo: Versus (The brave, tenacious and determined women vs the spineless and depraved serial killer Official plot synopsis: Tallahassee, 1978. Sorority president Pamela Schumacher wakes to a shocking scene of implausible violence and death, and is drawn into a mystifying crime that grips the nation for decades . . . In Seattle, Tina Cannon connects her best friend’s disappearance to the Tallahassee tragedy, and is convinced that a single man is responsible. Determined to find justice, […]

Not what I expected; Exactly what I expected

Night's Fall by Kristen Ashley

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Oh, gentle reader… I thought I had broken myself of the Kristen Ashley habit. Longtime Cannonball Read participants will remember my earlier addiction to her books and my lamentations over them. And by lamentations, I mean my lamenting over my inability to quit reading books that made me want to scream in frustration over the way the female main characters were inevitably told to just get over bad behaviors by the male main characters due to their possessive, protective feelings about said female. I’m jerk […]

“…looking back at those pages, I shivered to see our plunge into darkness, day by day, without realizing it was a spiral, and its nadir, the abyss.”

The Year of the Wind: A Novel by Karina Pacheco Medrano

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Cbr18bingo Sheep. Sheep and other livestock are mentioned throughout the novel and sheep feature prominently in a particularly important scene Earlier in the year I reviewed Rabih Alameddine’s brilliant novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) and one of the things I noted in my review is that the narrator, who is a few years older than I am, describes growing up in Lebanon and Beirut in the 1970s/80s. I was in high school and college at that time, and […]

Everyone but the chihuahua is a suspect

The Sleeping Sisters by Jennifer Givhan

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CBR18 Bingo – Or: I can read about violence against women or… violence against women. I started The Bone Thief by Vanessa Lillie when I decided I wasn’t up for a mystery so dependent on real world violence against indigenous women and people. Then I jumped into this book like an idiot because I liked the cover. It was too late to go back by the time I realized Jennifer Givhan’s The Sleeping Sisters was inspired by the unsolved West Mesa Murders. I was hooked […]

Silvia Moreno-Garcia does noir as well as you think she would – brilliantly

The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno Garcia

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Ulises Linares (not his real name) is a conman who engages in lonely hearts and romance cons. At almost 30, and after the death of his father, he’s feeling a pressure to pull a con that will give him some stability. He decides to pursue Perla Inclan, a woman whose family once owned a reasonably successful coffee company in Puerco Ahogado (which means “drowned pig”), in the mountains of Veracruz. But Perla is no easy mark. And her niece, Inés, clocks him pretty quickly. The […]



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