Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Maybe my favourite Jenny Holiday book so far

Book Club Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

by Leave a Comment

4.5 stars CBR18 Bingo: Craft (this book dwells a lot on writing as a craft – both novels and screenplays) Thank you to Forever and NetGalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. This book is on sale now. Blair Kellermoon (former rom-com star, now powerful producer) has adapted several novels as movies and TV series and runs a book club, and the books she picks usually get huge sales boosts and are again likely to be optioned for adaptation. Suffice it to say, […]

Sparse yet dreamy atmosphere

The Wolf and his king by Finn Longman

by Leave a Comment

Bingo Square: You (one of the novel’s POVs is 2nd person) I quite enjoyed this novel. It has a kind of dreamy quality to the writing; it’s a queer retelling of a 12th century French werewolf story, and it has a bit of barebones feel to the storytelling that makes it feel like a fairy tale and transports the reader back to an older time. The chapters alternate between “Him” (Bisclavret), “You” (the king), and “Other” (the wolf). Bisclavret has lived with his curse his […]

“Who’s on First,” but Make it Percival Everett

Dr. No by Percival Everett

by 1 Comment

You may not have known you needed a Percival Everett take on a Bond villain, but you definitely do. Our main character, Wala Kitu (words that mean “nothing” in Tagalog and Swahili) is a brilliant mathematician who studies nothing. As in nothingness, which is not the same as the nothing that is the absence of something. He was sought out by villain John Sill to provide guidance as Sill seeks to steal nothing from the government. Nothing becomes part of a constant play on words, […]

My first draft of this review was entirely about a video game

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

by 4 Comments

CBR18 Bingo – joker: because some call them the space cowboy… Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky is the first book in the Final Architecture series. I see his work recommended a lot and I think I know his work. Then I realize I’m thinking of an imaginary person who is part Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and part Arkady Martine. So I’m happy to finally read something by the actual author. Humans are settling into the galactic space community when a mysterious and seemingly all-powerful space […]

The Violence Will Be Televised

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

by Leave a Comment

What I’ve learned from dystopian/speculative fiction books, including this one, is that the revolution may not be televised, but the human rights abuses, the cruelty, the inhumanity, the degradation, and the state-sponsored violence will be streamed to the masses. On its face, Chain-Gang All-Stars is about “Links” of one prison chain-gang versus Links from other chain-gangs from other prisons. Prisoners who “voluntarily” enter the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) program legally murder each other, in packed arenas and on pay-for-view, for the enjoyment of a […]

Tradwife by Michelle Brandon

Tradwife by Michelle Brandon

by 2 Comments

I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review. I don’t know what to say. It’s going to be really hard to not say a lot that spoils this book, but I have so many questions and ultimately feel dissatisfied with how Brandon went about ending this. And the reveals/twists after a while had me going really? And there were so many plot holes going on that I just stopped counting after a while. I think that the multiple POVs […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo