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.

 

Gender nonconformity Pride

Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding by Maia Kobabe and Sarah Peitzmeier

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I will start my review of Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding with I am a cisgender female who has never experienced the body dysmorphia the people interviewed in this book have experienced/are experiencing. I understand disliking one’s body and the emotional results that can create, as I have had my own issues with body love, but I cannot understand the depth that impact can take on one when it is not only not “right” by not only “looking wrong”,  but also is the wrong gender […]

“How many Reenas are there in this goddamn world?”

Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk by Rebecca Godfrey

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This is a very well written work of non-fiction. The author is in fact a writer of fiction, but she spent years investigating the crime at the center of the story (now a series on Hulu) and interviewing the many people involved. She attended trials and spoke with legal and law enforcement agents. This story of the murder of a 14-year-old girl by her peers is both chilling and difficult to put down. Godfrey paints a vivid picture of a community rocked by the shocking […]

“It is always awkward to be face-to-face with people who have what you want.”

Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil

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Even though Joanne McNeil is a “technology” writer, she always writes first and foremost about people. In her non-fiction book Lurking, she used her own experience growing up online to explore how over time people became “users.” (Blech! I miss you, 1990s internet!) She starts close and human and then zooms out to larger cultural issues. I think that’s where the power of her insight comes from – the humanity of it. McNeil’s debut novel Wrong Way is fiction, but the author employs the same […]

A World You Want To Wear Like a Blanket

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

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Becky Chambers’ first Monk & Robot book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, struck a chord in me in a way that few other books have. Chambers built a world so beautiful, so full of hope, that I just wanted to curl up in it like a blanket. She continues that glorious world-building in the second book, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Picking up right after book 1, we join Sibling Dex and Mosscap as they re-enter human territory and plan to introduce Mosscap to the […]

The Intersection of Love and the Law

You'll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love by Marcia A. Zug

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In this short history of the legalities of marriage in the United States, Zug takes us through how marriage as an institution has shifted over the centuries and how the many reasons for marrying for something other than love, such money, status, or legal benefits, played its part in that. Coming from a culture where marriage is considered an essential step of adulthood and is still sometimes arranged by one’s parents, I never really thought much about it, or why the legal institution of marriage […]

Stitches

Stitches by Junji Ito

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The more Japanese fiction I read, the less I expect it to explain itself. This is true whether you are reading Junji Ito or Haruki Murakami; there is a tendency to let weirdness just sort of sit out there where everyone can see it, creating a surreal feeling where you can’t really tell if you’re missing something or not. Stitches follows this pattern, with short vignettes (each one referred to as a “stitch”) making up a series of strange tales. This book is not a […]



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