Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

These characters have SO much in common, but their crippling insecurities may be the worst thing they share

While You Were Seething by Charlotte Stein

by Leave a Comment

3.5 stars Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. This book will be out on April 9th. Daisy Emmett is an excellent PR manager and has successfully managed a number of difficult clients, but trying to repair the image of famous romance author Caleb Miller, after he very publicly declared to the world that “happy endings are for fools”, might be her most difficult job yet. Their mutual dislike of one another started when they were […]

“No meaning–that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end”

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck

by Leave a Comment

We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference–all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There is no context for our lives.” Steven Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell is a horror book without the gore. A man named Soren dies of brain cancer in his 40’s and finds himself confronted by a lesser demon who tells Soren and some others that the only true religion is Zoroastrianism, and as none of them follow […]

“It was as though they hadn’t seen me, as though I was here, and yet not here.”

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

by Leave a Comment

“You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist–can’t you see that?” Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is an electrifying study of a young Black man and his different experiences as he journeys through a racist society. The narrator, who is never named, starts the book telling the reader he lives in the sealed off basement of a Harlem apartment, the dark and cold offset by over 1,300 electric lights. The very first line of the book is “I am an invisible man.” In the beginning he recollects an […]

There is no Chinese Princess Anastasia

The Fourth Princess by Janie Chang

by Leave a Comment

The Fourth Princess by Janie Chang is about two mysterious women. Caroline Stanton is a rich orphan American living in China right before the 1912 fall of the Qing Dynasty. She met her not nearly as rich (but still rich) husband Thomas when he saved her during the Wellington railway disaster. Although she has mysterious memory gaps about the event. Together, they have money and live in Thomas’s uncle’s Shanghai mansion… or do they? No. Uncle Mason is a liar and he doesn’t own the […]

“I have received many love notes about my wit. Though they are often disguised as strongly worded letters which request I hold my tongue.”

A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales

by 1 Comment

When a rich, eligible young man comes to town, Beatrice Steele, a Regency-era miss with an unseemly interest in crime, is determined that her younger sister Louisa will be his bride. But when he is poisoned in front of the whole ball, she must solve his murder instead with the assistance of the prickly detective Drake. This book is a humorous pastiche of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie with plenty of intrigue and funny characters, but its inspiration is while in some ways its greatest […]

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

by Leave a Comment

This is hands down my favorite book of Moreno-Garcia since Mexican Gothic. I don’t know about anyone else, but I found some of her other works not hitting it for me. This one had it all, memorable characters, a very strong plot, and a great ending. The Bewitching follows in essence three distinct timelines that all come together in the end. Timeline one follows Minerva, an international graduate student from Mexico that is currently enrolled in Stoneridge College in Massachusetts in 1998. Minerva is trying to […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo