Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Just because it is spring, doesn’t mean you can’t read a book about winter things

Brown Girl in the Snow by Yolanda T. Marshall and Marianne Ferrer

by Leave a Comment

September 2025 is the start of the Autumn/Winter release books. And this year (2025) so far has it looking like there will be some terribly hot titles. I am not just talking about whether they have “hot themes” (immigration, new school, historical events) or are from or set in a warm climate, I am talking  about whether they are going to be talked about and if they are going to get noticed and which ones are going to get awards and recognition. And Brown Girl […]

Not to beat death of the author to death, but…

The Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

by Leave a Comment

Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has a great title and a great cover. The novel itself isn’t quite as good as the name and cover art, but it’s pretty damn good. It’s also pretty damn pretentious and happy with itself. But the author – of whom I knew nothing when I started – has earned the right to be self satisfied far more than I’ve earned any right to criticize him for it. I was just going to copy and paste a […]

‘Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way’

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

by 4 Comments

I visited Seoul in March for a flash holiday and on my way back, I stopped in a bookstore at Incheon airport. In their small English section, the only books they provided were English translations of books by South Korean authors or travel guides for the country. No Tim Cook biography, no Mitch Albom, no Dan Brown or whatever else you’d typically find in an airport bookshop. I found that so clever — restricting the English-language offerings to art created by South Koreans. This capitalistically […]

“Cats were not, in her experience, an animal with much soul. Prosaic, practical little creatures as a general rule. It would suit her very well to be thought catlike.”

Soulless by Gail Carriger

by 1 Comment

It’s dreadfully awkward being soulless in Victorian High Society. Add to that being the spinster daughter of a dead Italian, and life just isn’t working out for Alexia Tarabotti, and that’s before she’s attacked by a vampire at a social gathering. Bad enough that breaks all societal etiquette, but it also comes along with the downside that now Alexia has to deal with Lord Conall Maccon, the loud, obnoxious, Scottish werewolf sent by Queen Victoria to investigate. It seems that known vampires are disappearing nightly, […]

To family and Faerieland and pizza and stories and new beginnings and scheming great schemes. I can toast to that.”

The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black

by 2 Comments

I love when a trilogy is a banger from start to finish. Exiled at the end of the last book, Jude is out for either self-pitying or revenge, mostly self-pitying. Running errands for a local Fae in Maine, riding a dinky bike squatting in the spare room of her older half-sister’s ex-girlfriend’s apartment is not the way she thought her reign would go. I feel like a constellation of wounds, held together with string and stubbornness. Of course that changes when Taryn shows up because […]

Four books for the price of one review (and a lunch break filled with books)

The Peacock Who Howled with Jackals  by Nahid Kazemi

You Can't Tame a Tiger by Stephanie Ellen Sy

RJ and the Ticking Clock by Ian Duncan

Who Needs the Dark?: The Many Ways Living Things Depend on Darkness by Laura Alary

by Leave a Comment

The other day I found a few titles I was interested in via an email newsletter. When I looked them up to see if reader copies online were available, they had thumbnails of the images, but not the full  text. I read these introductions, but was hoping to find finished copies sometime in the future (as they are all summer and fall publications). The next day what to my wondering eyes did appear? It was eight tiny reindeer…. I mean, those four titles I had […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo