Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Departed

At End of Day by George V. Higgins

by Leave a Comment

Been reading a lot of Boston crime novels lately so it made sense for me to finally circle back to George V. Higgins’ final work. My journey with Higgins is an interesting one. I first read The Friends of Eddie Coyle ten years ago and while I thought it was good, I really had no idea how to appreciate. Its dialogue-heavy approach with a large heap of verisimilitude made me feel like I was reading transcripts of a conversation between gangsters and cops rather than a typical […]

We are family (Goodness help you)

Summer Is for Cousins by Rajani Larocca

Oh No, the Aunts Are Here by Adam Rex

by Leave a Comment

As a cousin, I compare myself to books about cousins. And while me and mine did play and have ice cream, we did not do it  the way this family does in Summer Is for Cousins.  But it does not matter how you spent your summers; you probably can relate to Ravi’s family. He is the almost youngest (there is a new seventh cousin to his sixth place), he admires his oldest cousin, and he likes sharing ice cream time with all the cousins. The […]

What really happened after the ball

Cinderella and a Mouse Called Fred by Deborah Hopkinson

by Leave a Comment

I like fairy tales, and while I do enjoy them classically done, I like them with a fun twist, too. We start out Cinderella and a Mouse Called Fred with the usual Cinderella basics. One grumpy fairy godmother, one pumpkin, some sisters, a stepmother, a royal party. However, there are a few differences such as Fred tells the story (he’s a mouse, if you couldn’t tell by the title) that somewhat befriends Cindy (no sewing of clothing, but there is some pumpkin protecting, squeaks and […]

The girls with the nature names

The Wishing Flower by A. J. Irving

by Leave a Comment

I will start off my review of The Wishing Flower with a slightly controversial observation. While, yes, this book is about a queer child and her feelings acceptance, understanding, and the want for a friend, you can adapt this to also show it is “just” about a child who is a bit shyer, who does not really fit in, but in the end does find a place to fit because she found a friend; that she found someone who accepts her for herself. And in […]

Wow, what a bummer.

The Night Ship by Jess Kidd

by Leave a Comment

It’s actually pretty impressive how this book could take super interesting subject matter and make it this dull. This book did absolutely nothing for me, except make me wish it was over. I can’t entirely pinpoint why, so I’m chalking it up to disliking the style it was written in, but there were also some baked-in flaws that could have made it better for me. This is a dual-timeline story, one in 1628 following a young Dutch girl whose mother has just died, who is […]

what a saga (ha) and unexpectedly delightful

The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley

by Leave a Comment

CW: assault A starkly different recommendation–from The Pale King to this, which couldn’t be more different if you’d tried. There’s more plot in a single paragraph of the latter than in all of the former’s million odd pages…and this book isn’t short by any means. This is a fictionalized reconstruction of the Norwegian settlers of Greenland of the fourteenth century, written in the style of one of those old sagas originally passed down through oral tradition. It’s actually quite hard to sell this one, and I think […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo