Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Multigenerational missing girls and ripple effects

Salt Bones by Jennifer Givhan

by Leave a Comment

Salt Bones fulfills the “family” square on CBR17 Bingo. Actual rating: 4.5 stars Salt Bones is a story of myth, which missing girls matter, and cycles of generational pain. I was really excited to read this based on the premise of Persephone and Demeter story through a Mexicali perspective, and this was great. There are so many different mother-daughter dynamics explored, and all of them dealing with different kinds of trauma. The Veracruz family seems to be cursed because twenty years ago Mal’s younger sister, […]

Murderbot + ART = Joy!

Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

by Leave a Comment

Cbr17bingo Favorite I’ve read this book, actually the whole existing Murderbot Diaries series, a few times, and I think I have reviewed it for CBR a couple of times, too. So it is definitely a favorite. Artificial Condition is the second book in the Murderbot series, the follow up to All Systems Red. Series 1 of the Murderbot Diaries just ended on Apple TV and I loved it. They made some changes from All Systems Red but they were changes that made sense for a […]

Making the Sausage – Hollywood Style

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

by Leave a Comment

cbr17bingo Arts Schulberg, the son of a successful Hollywood producer, is probably best known for his screenplays (On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd), but he started as a novelist with What Makes Sammy Run?, about a Hollywood publicist. This book follows about ten years later, and is the thinly fictionalized story of an ill-fated trip Schulberg made with F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Dartmouth.  Fitzgerald was nearing the end of his life and was trying to scrape together cash by working on screenplays for […]

hot take the vibe was good, but the magic system (or witchcraft, or what have you) suffered from some floppiness that ruins the tension

Weyward by Emilia Hart

by 3 Comments

BINGO: “Green” — so much of the book is about the Weyward relationship t to nature, and while it’s more about animals than trees it still feels green to me It’s a classic issue: if there’s magic, there needs to be flaws which prevent our characters from just MacGuffin-ing their way to a happy resolution. Call it the Kryptonite Conundrum, wherein Superman is required to have a rather odd, easily transported weakness lest he turn up at every fight, punchy punchy stare-y stare-y and everyone […]

hot take, turns out even if you avoid the overt government racism, there’s still normal First Nations racism to deal with

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

by Leave a Comment

BINGO: the letter “B” Tis the season for multiple POV books, I guess, as this flips between two interwoven lives and also between timelines. In the 70s (?) (ish?) the youngest daughter of a Mi’kmaq family goes missing during the annual berry picking season in Maine. Joe, the second youngest, is the last to have seen Ruthie, but despite everyone’s strenuous efforts she remains lost at the end of the season when everyone has to leave and go back to the homestead in Canada. Joe’s […]

hot take one of the better entries in this series but Dear Lord, The Path To Love Does Not Run Smooth does it??

The Rushworth Family Plot by Claudia Gray

by 4 Comments

BINGO: Family, right? Has to be. I fear my patience for the obstacles that are constantly strewn in Miss Tilney and Mr. Darcy Jr’s way is starting to smart a bit. I’ll admit that this one was rather clever, and even though it took a while for the penny to drop when it did I genuinely felt the tension (and could hear the soundtrack to the movie — Scene: our ladies of leisure browse the art exhibition…people are whispering…the music crescendos… suddenly the whispers get […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo