Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Kind of a badass

The Bodyguard by Katherine Center

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been trying to find audiobooks for my commute to and from work. It’s not that long of a trip, but I figure I’m better off using the time for good instead of wasting it. The latest audiobook I discovered available at my library was The Bodyguard (2022) by Katherine Center. I’m usually a fan of bodyguard romances because I’m a sucker for a strong, protective guy. However, this book gives us a female bodyguard, and she’s safeguarding a man. Jack Stapleton is a famous actor, and […]

CBR15 Bingo: Hold Steady (my first actual Bingo!)

Never Been Kissed by Timothy Janovski

by Leave a Comment

CBR15 Bingo: Hold Steady (Wren is in quite a rut at the start of the book) Official book description: Wren Roland has never been kissed, but he wants that movie-perfect ending more than anything. Feeling nostalgic on the eve of his birthday, he sends emails to all the boys he (ahem) loved before he came out. Morning brings the inevitable Oh God What Did I Do?, but he brushes that panic aside. Why stress about it? None of his could-have-beens are actually going to read […]

Just Because a Famous Guy Wrote It. . .

Peter the Great’s African: Experiments in Prose by Alexander Pushkin

by Leave a Comment

cbr15 bingo Europe When I saw Pushkin’s name on this, it was very familiar of course, but I couldn’t remember reading anything by him.  Come to find out, he may be the Father of Russian Literature, but he’s a poet, and I mostly do novels.  But the familiar feeling I was getting was because he was also the go-to source for the Russian romantic composers, a genre I have always loved.  Ruslan and Lyudmila?  Overture by Glinka.  Eugene Onegin?  An opera by Tchaikovsky, best known […]

Friendship and love in the midst of “a shitstorm of murder, mayhem and blackmail.”

The Bandit Queens by Parini Schroff

by Leave a Comment

I thoroughly enjoyed Schroff’s debut novel. I can’t share specifics about the moment I knew that I had fallen in book-love without spoiling, but essentially the tone fell into place for me about a third of the way into the novel and it never disappointed me thereafter.  Not that I should be too worried about “spoiling” this book – it isn’t a novel based on solving a mystery of any sort. Certain plot points unfold in ways both predictable and delightful (if a little gruesome […]

Amazing Emotional Story

One Blood by Denene Millner

by Leave a Comment

Oof, this is a seriously intense and emotional story, but so compellingly told. Told through the experiences of three women – Grace, LoLo, and Rae – it chronicles the ties of family and motherhood as Black women and the ways intergenerational trauma ripples and impacts people moving forward. Grace is a teen when her mother is murdered by her boyfriend and her grandmother is taken away for claiming a white woman’s baby was white and not a product of an affair with a Black man […]

Mary Sue, the bee

The Bees by Laline Paull

by Leave a Comment

Bingo: Sex;  Passport: Allegory I guess I was prejudiced against this book from the start.  This year, my home book club is reading a different genre each month and this was the group choice for “fantasy”.  While some reviews compared it to The Hunger Games, or The Handmaid’s Tale, I thought it was telling that its award nominations were for “women’s fiction” and not fantasy.  I can see why this book was well received.  Life in a beehive is an unusual premise for a novel, […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo