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.

 

Like the frog in hot water

The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell

by Leave a Comment

I generally avoid books on climate change because they scare the shit out of me. There’s nothing like reading for hours about how we’re mindlessly ruining our only planet to bring out maximum anxiety and helplessness. I’m always left with a deep urge to do something, and feeling that it’s all out of my hands anyway. But I also don’t like to be ignorant, so when I saw The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (2023) by Jeff Goodell on NPR’s “Books we Love” […]

Yes, let the Taylor Swift-lyric title and the beautiful cover lure you in.

Don't Want You Like a Best Friend (Mischief & Matchmaking, #1) by Emma R. Alban

by 8 Comments

[finishes book] [three and a half weeks later] I don’t know why I’m having such a mental block about writing this review, so I’m just going to go and see what happens. [two days later] This is an adult queer Regency romance featuring two young women as the protagonists, and it’s the first sapphic historical I think that I have really loved*. There still isn’t that much f/f historical romance or ones involving nb folks to begin with, but the ones I’ve read have not […]

Well, I’ve got some thinking to do…

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price, PhD

by 10 Comments

When my therapist asked if I had read Unmasking Autism a few weeks ago, I knew my whole mentality towards a lot of things was about to change. So I put it on hold at the library…but then I couldn’t wait so I downloaded the audiobook on Libro.FM and bought a print copy the next time I was at B&N. From the start, I had a whole new way of looking at what my life had looked like for nearly four decades, and what that might […]

“No life is ever in the skinniest bit predictable.”

People Collide by Isle McElroy

by Leave a Comment

Can you imagine gender-bending body switching done well? A novel in which both bodies and minds are taken seriously, even amid the most impossible of circumstances? Isle McElroy, who also identifies as non-binary, manages to capture the necessity and insignificance of gender in this brief, genius novel. The premise – a newly wed couple in their later 20s, living in Bulgaria, wakes to find themselves inhabiting one another’s bodies. We exist primarily in the perspective of Eli, who discovers that while his thoughts are his […]

Gold Rush

Oscar Wars by Michael Schulman

by Leave a Comment

The perfect lead-in to this weekend’s Academy Awards ceremony, Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars is a broad overview of Hollywood history filtered through the prism of their biggest night. In eleven chapters, he focuses in on the moments and the movements that have changed the movie business and the culture at large. The book starts, logically, at the beginning, as the nascent industry conceives of the Motion Picture Academy and its awards banquet. There are multiple motivations for doing so, from establishing film as a legitimate […]

“Dear friends I cannot rescue you”

If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton

by Leave a Comment

I heard about this collection last summer, in a context that will sound a little insufferable, i.e. at a poetry roundtable at an Irish Studies conference where we were discussing a fairly experimental work, but bear with me: someone brought up this collection as a poetry collection that, yes, was concerned with place, as so much poetry is, but one of those places was the digital world of Super Mario Bros. Well, that got my attention. But also I was tired AF from jet lag so […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo