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.

 

A quest for fulfilment

Piglet by Lottie Hazell

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Piglet is the nickname of the lead of this tale of wedding woe. She’s a cookbook editor with a loving fiance, a supportive social network, and family who loves and understands her. Or, is she? In the fortnight leading up to her elaborate and long-awaited wedding, her fiance confesses infidelity. We, the reader, never learn the sordid details of his unfaithfulness, because it doesn’t really matter what he did, right? It matters that he did it. It’s the betrayal that eats away at Piglet. But […]

ALL the Kate Canterbary

Shucked by Kate Canterbary

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Owing to a significant gap writing CBR reviews, I had discovered and embraced many new authors by the time I  started participating again, including Kate Canterbary. As is my way, I discovered her from an Emmalita review of The Worst Guy which is, so far, Canterbary’s best book. I have since consumed most of her output with consistently good to sometimes excellent results. Canterbary is great at steam and even greater at clever. Despite plowing through her back catalogue, Shucked (The Loew Brothers) is the […]

“When does who you’re pretending to be stop being a pretense and turn into who you really are?”

Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis

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Cbr16bingo Fiasco A guy wakes up, injured, on the floor of an evil looking castle room. Who did this to him? What evil force has been at work?? Who is responsible for the tacky decor??? Though his memories are mostly gone, he realizes he did it. He is a dark wizard and he somehow is responsible for all of it. It’s a dreadful conclusion to reach, and Gav (aka the Dread Lord Gavrax), looking around at his garishly evil castle and the way his goblin […]

Do All Podcasts Transform to True Crime? Or Does That Only Happen In the Books I Read?

None of This is True by Lisa Jewell

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Call me basic, but I love me a good psychological thriller. Trying to guess what’s going to happen, the truth behind the misdirection, the twists, figuring out whether a narrator is reliable or not… They’re just fun. Lisa Jewell is a prolific writer, with over 20 published works. I’ve read a few of her books and enjoyed every one, including this latest. None of This Is True is fun, a gripping story about a podcaster who finds herself in the middle of her own true-crime […]

Who knew a book with “bleak” in the title could be so much fun? (with helpful charts!)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

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Bleak House has been brooding on my TBR list for years because, even though I’m a long-time Dickens fan, I was intimidated by the length and by what I perceived would be a weighty novel. I’m ecstatic that I overcame my hesitance, because this novel was more fun than a mariachi band on a roller coaster. Sure, about 9 people die, but you can’t make gruel without smashing a few oats, right? There are so many characters that the death toll amounts to maybe 12%, and […]

“You can’t know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain.”

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

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I love a multigenerational family tale, one that sweeps across history and continents. And in that, this novel succeeds, with lovely writing, to boot. The story of the Cassar family is a fictional version of Messud’s own history, and hinges on the point at which her French Algerian family grapples with the history (and future) of colonialism around World War II. Messud’s own great grandfather wrote an in-depth family history, which would later take Messud (and her fictional counterpart within this novel) 20 years to […]



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