Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Dark Olympus Double Feature

Neon Gods by Katee Robert

Electric Idol by Katee Robert

by 2 Comments

Neon Gods – 3.5 stars Persephone lives in deadly, glittering Olympus, where her mother is one of the leaders as Demeter. When her engagement to wife-killing Zeus is announced, she flees the upper city right into the arms of a man who wasn’t supposed to exist. I came to Goodreads, I saw that this was a sexy Hades and Persephone retelling, I devoured the book. I liked the characters of Persephone and Hades, who both must wear masks of different kinds and buy into the […]

Introducing your new favorite crime solving duo

Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

by 3 Comments

Introducing Pentecost and Parker, two unconventional female detectives who couldn’t care less about playing by the rules, in their cases and in their lives. Well, here we are in 2022 and this book starts off in 1942 New York.  Willowjean, aka Will, Parker is a young woman who works in the circus as a Jill-of-all trades.  When the book opens, she’s picking up extra work doing guard duty at a construction site.  As fortune has it, she saves the life of an older woman who […]

Window Dressing

To Marry and to Meddle by Martha Waters

by 5 Comments

The English countryside in early September was a glorious place. The sun shone. The bees buzzed. The heady scent of wildflowers lingered in the air. Emily Turner could not think of a more romantic setting for the world’s least romantic marriage proposal. Julian needs a wife who makes him look respectable to remake his theatre’s reputation, Emily needs to get out from under her parents’ thumb and away from a skeevy suitor. Marriage sounds like the perfect solution – but being married is more complicated […]

How Cannonball Read has given me permission to not finish a book

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

by 6 Comments

I love how supportive the Cannonball community is with the constant reassurance one doesn’t have to review everything read and that it’s okay to not finish a book.  Historically, I have been a finisher of books.  Then I started reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James for Cannonball Bingo 2020. Thirty-six pages in I quit because I could not handle the near constant parade of sex, bodily fluids, violence, and disparaging remarks about boys who are actually girls and vice versa.  That was an […]

My first five star read of 2022. I did not expect this!

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

by 4 Comments

So I’ve been bemoaning this all over Goodreads for a couple of weeks now, but I’ve been in a five-star drought since 2022 started. (I wonder if it’s because the last book I read in 2021, Harrow the Ninth, was one of the most five-star books I’ve ever read, and the universe is just balancing itself out . . . ) I’ve been waiting, impatiently, to see what book would capture my emotions enough for me to slap that coveted five-star rating on, as I’ve […]

Even better the second time around

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

by 11 Comments

So at the beginning of the pandemic when I first discovered Booktube (actually, when I found 2 people who talked about books on YouTube and didn’t yet know it was a thing), I noticed how both of them loved this completely random guy, but I didn’t know if I’d like fantasy. I don’t know why I thought it was supposed to be such an intimidating genre, it was just not what I’d been used to reading. Anyway,  Emily Fox suggested to start with Warbreaker, since […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo