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.

 

Twisty, Serial (the podcast)-style thriller

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

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Here is my first book of 2023 released in 2023 – and yet, with much of the action taking place in 2018, and 1995, it feels like an artifact of a different time altogether. At times, this reads like a Serial origin story. In 2018, Bodie Kane is invited back to Granby, a boarding school in New Hampshire that she attended in the early 1990s. Her graduating class was infamous for the deaths of three students – one of those students being her roommate, Thalia Keith. […]

A Celebration of Books and Readers

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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I am a sucker for  Louise Erdrich, and this book did not disappoint. This is a book lover’s story: the romance of words, sentences, the independent bookstore, discussions about books, book recommendations, all wrapped up in a darn good story. Tookie, the narrator begins: “While in prison, I received a dictionary. . . I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in the afterlife. So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e‘s, with its […]

In defense of Pippin, the actual best hobbit

The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

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I did not care for the Lord of the Rings when I was younger. It took my then-boyfriend three attempts at making me watch through the series before I could stay awake past Boromir dying. It just that Boromir takes too damn long to die. But he persisted and fed me tasty things to keep me awake and I discovered LOTR (or the LORT we call it at home) meme groups online and suddenly I was in baby. I mean, I needed to understand the underlying […]

Review #2: 1203 Pages of Awesome

The Bonehunters by Steven Erikson

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The sixth book in an epic fantasy ten book series, reading this was a no-brainer for me. I have already read the first five books, and mostly loved them, so how could I not continue? The Bonehunters publisher’s summary is as follows (spoilers hidden): “The Seven Cities Rebellion has been crushed. Sha’ik is dead. One last rebel force remains, holed up in the city of Y’Ghatan and under the fanatical command of Leoman of the Flails. The prospect of laying siege to this ancient fortress […]

“their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban’s memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams”

The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa (Translator)

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I have been circling Gabriel García Márquez for decades, almost too afraid to approach his work at all. On and off the reading lists his works go, a constant pendulum of my ambition or lack thereof. When staring at our Bingo squares and realizing a few short stories and novellas were likely to help my progress I went on the hunt for a few and The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel García Márquez came up. Here we go, I thought – here’s […]

The Cultish Homecoming

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

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There was a lot going on in the week following my purchase of this book, one I grabbed with great anticipation. So I saved it for the last few days to really savor the experience. Rachel Harrison’s The Return was a sneaky good read; I felt like I was on her storytelling wavelength and that helped overcome the many negative reviews that, I think, missed the point of her book. And now she’s writing a book about returning home to a religious cult? Hell yeah, let’s […]



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