Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Not my favorite Connie Willis

Passage by Connie Willis

by 3 Comments

780 pages! Oof. Joanna (Dr. Lander) works at hospital, doing research into near death experiences (NDEs). She works with a nurse in the ER who pages her every time a patient codes and is revived so she can run to their bedside and ask about their near death experience. A doctor looking into the physical causes of NDEs comes to the hospital wanting to partner with her. They struggle to get enough research subjects, so Joanna eventually agrees to go under with the experimental drug […]

Cover: Pink, Behavior: Red Flag

One Night Only by Catherine Walsh

by Leave a Comment

Short Version: He’s a charmer. She can’t get out her own head. Panic and a medium misunderstanding. Shorter Version: Oy vey with the comeheregoaway. Shortest Version: Walk away, man. Having made the happy discovery of new-to-me author Catherine Walsh, and wanting to encourage her ongoing output, I have snapped up most of her very reasonably priced catalogue. All of her novels come with sub/sur-titles exclaiming, “An absolutely hilarious and uplifting romantic comedy” or “A totally hilarious and unforgettable Christmas romantic comedy”. This 2021 effort, One […]

The Snail, the Pumpkin and the Squash

Stories of the Islands by Clar Angkasa

by Leave a Comment

Three gorgeously illustrated, feminist-twist folktales, myths, stories are included in Stories of the Islands by Clar Angkasa (Clar pronounced like Clark without the k) based their stories on the ones of their childhood, adding what might not seem at first “girl power” but will become that, to each one. There are some mature themes (the giant wants to eat the girl, the father is abusive to his daughters, a village thinks that a woman who is single with no children is odd and tells her […]

“I don’t want to talk about time travel…”

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

by Leave a Comment

“…because if we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.” Thankfully, Emily St. John Mandel also makes the choice to not get bogged down in discussing time travel. Hell, the last Avengers movie probably does more dissection of the implications and intricacies of time travel than Sea of Tranquility, and I mean that as a compliment. I think Sea of Tranquility is a great example of a “soft science fiction” story in the […]

Present Tense, Past Perfect

11.22.63 by Stephen King

by Leave a Comment

It’s 2011, and Jake Epping is a high school English teacher in a sleepy Maryland town when his friend Al, who runs an implausibly cheap diner on the edge of town, asks him for a big favour: go back in time and stop the Kennedy assassination. You see, Al’s diner has a somewhat unusual feature in its storeroom: a portal back to 1958. After a few furtive explorations, Jake agrees to go down the rabbit hole, find Lee Harvey Oswald, and stop him before he […]

Witnessing History on the Ground

Brave Bird at Wounded Knee by Rachel Bithell

by Leave a Comment

When the occupation and siege at Wounded Knee hits the news, Patsy’s classmates are annoyed or dismissive, but Patsy is worried for her aunt’s family, who live nearby on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. When I was younger I was completely hooked on those Dear America diaries about girls living through turbulent eras of American history. There was something about getting an average girl’s perspective of historic events that really immersed me in the story. Brave Bird at Wounded Knee follows a similar format, though […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo