Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“This modern love breaks me”

Blue Sisters (2024) by Coco Mellors

by Leave a Comment

Blue Sisters is about four sisters–except Nicky, the youngest, is dead, and Avery (the eldest organised lawyer one), Lucky (the beautiful model and self-destructive drug-addled party girl), and Bonnie (the sporty one), are flailing, a year on. There is some nuance here–Avery is a former heroin addict about to blow her perfect marriage and house in Hampstead Heath apart; Lucky plays guitar. Bonnie, most intriguingly, is a boxer, and Mellors’s descriptions of her physicality are some of the best passages in the novel: Your knuckles, […]

Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts

Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts

by Leave a Comment

Please not that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. Wow. I got nothing. This was pretty awful. I don’t even know what the point of this one was. It was so lackluster. Things happen, serial killers run about Maryland, and then more things happen. The book ends. I honestly wish that Roberts would just write a straight up thriller and ditch the romance. You can see her heart is not in it much anymore. Her latest romantic […]

Fun and Games in Tudor England

The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

by Leave a Comment

What is this, Tatooine?  Is not Tudor England the most outrageous wretched hive of scum and villainy one can ever imagine?  Friends, it is that, hands down. This tale, one of the many involving King Henry the Eighth, who is most famous for being the fat guy who was Queen Elizabeth 1st’s father, focuses on his second queen, the first beheaded one.  (Ain’t gonna lie, ain’t gonna cry.)  But mostly it is the story of the Boleyn siblings, Anne, Mary and George.  These three never […]

“I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge”

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

by 6 Comments

This review has been a long time in coming. I borrowed Harrow the Ninth on Libby back in February and made it 60 percent of the way through before the app stole it back (one advantage of physical books is that you can keep them way past their due date and just pay them back later, instead of the library yoinking them away through your phone). After two and a half agonizing months on the waiting list, I finally got it back last week and […]

Sunrise of the Weeping

Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins

by 1 Comment

I took a much-needed break from my brief—yet frustrating—foray into the romantasy genre to return to my comfort zone: dystopia. And Sunrise on the Reaping did not disappoint. The book begins back in the bleak, coal-dust-covered District 12, as Haymitch Abernathy prepares for the reaping of the Quarter Quell. It’s been 25 years since the Dark Days, and what better way to mark the anniversary of the end of slaughter than we MORE slaughter? Specifically, by sending double the number of children to their deaths […]

Like All-Fire | SOTR

Sunrise On The Reaping by Suzanne Collins

by Leave a Comment

The Hunger Games was a huge part of my youth. Dystopian YA was my lifeblood; series like THG and The Maze Runner kept my heart beating from the ages of nine to fourteen. When The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes came out, I felt myself immediately drawn back into the universe I had lived inside for years, and I could not wait for more. The promise of a new book, from Haymitch’s perspective, became almost too exciting to bear. Sunrise On The Reaping was absolutely […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo