Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Aliens Everywhere

On Earth As It Is On Television by Emily Jane

The Seep by Chana Porter

by Leave a Comment

I loved both of these books. They are both technically science fiction, in that they both deal with alien invasions. But like the best scifi, the stories are less about aliens and more about what makes us human. In Emily Jane’s On Earth As It Is On Television, the ships show up, hover for a day or so, and then just leave. What follows is a bit of a wacky adventure, featuring cats as main characters and an average dad just trying to hold it together […]

I pretended we hadn’t spent the past fifteen minutes playing a game of anti-romance whack-a-mole, where both of us did our best to knock our flirting down as hard as we could with verbal mallets.

Under the Meh-Stletoe by Leonor Soliz

by 1 Comment

I came across Leonor Soliz on Instagram during Hispanic Heritage Month when Latinex authors were boosting each other. She describes her writing as comfort books with characters who are trying to be good people with Latine and immigrant experiences and fat representation. I decided to try her most recent novella, Under the Meh-stletoe, set in the fictional town of Laguna Island. Laguna Island is on the Pacific coast (I think in Canada, as Soliz is a Chilean-Canadian author). In the 1970s and 80s, Laguna Island […]

#You’reCrushingItGirl!

Under The Influence by Noelle Crooks

by 2 Comments

Is there anything more terrifying than hearing your boss say “we’re a family!”? Harper Cruz is broke and jobless in NYC. When her friend shows her a job posting offering triple her last salary, of course she sends out her resume. In less than 24 hours Harper is the newest Visionary Support Strategist for self-help influencer Charlotte Green. At first Harper loves her new job but are the long hours, mandatory dance parties, and zero boundaries worth it? This book is trying real hard to […]

“We never thought of ourselves as witches….For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes.”

Weyward: A Novel by Emilia Hart

by Leave a Comment

Weyward is a novel about three women in three different time periods but from the same family line — the Weyward women. It is a story of women who don’t fit, who are “wayward,” and as such are feared and abused. Yet this is also about women who find their strength in that which sets them apart and who learn to love and empower themselves as a result. There are some supernatural elements to this story, and while I think that adding the supernatural to […]

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

The Hourglass Throne: The Tarot Sequence Book Three by K.D. Edwards

by Leave a Comment

“Maybe it’s time we get candid,” I suggested. Lady Death sighed. “Rune, it’s not as if we have orientation materials. There’s not a training module titled Shit We Keep Secret. I finished this at 2am this morning and I’m deep in book hangover-mode. Every few years, a series comes along that completely captures my heart, and this is the one for 2023. I adore these books. I am enthralled. Spoilers for The Hanged Man (book 2) below:   After claiming the Sun throne, Rune is […]

More disturbing than I expected

The Girl's I've Been by Tess Sharpe

by Leave a Comment

Time has flown by, but with this book, my book club will have been meeting for ten years! It’s been a great way to stay connected with friends and read books I might not otherwise read. I’m grateful that someone (I can’t remember who at this point) had this wonderful idea. We even kept it going during Covid with video chats. Because we started our book club with a young adult thriller (Divergent), we decided to mark our ten-year reunion with a young adult thriller […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo