Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

There needs to be a happy medium…

Advise and Consent by Allen Drury

by 2 Comments

I seem to do one of two things when writing a review. In the first instance, I try cobbling together my thoughts weeks or months after reading a book (a failed experiment that I keep trying), and unloading the errant thoughts I have while reading, or I write as I read and end up writing way more than any reasonable person wants to read. You can always tell the difference because one review is 5,000 words while the other is usually a short review dump […]

Dance with a side of criminal profiling

The Spectacular by Fiona Davis

by Leave a Comment

Fiona Davis can always be relied upon to create a good story focused on historically inspired events and buildings set in New York. This one was a little bit different since both of the time lines focused on the same person, Marion Brooks, just about 36 years apart. Most of the other novels of hers I have read have had a larger gap in time and the person in the more recent time line is trying to figure out the mystery while the reader knows […]

The first woman to sit down was a teenager

Claudette Colvin: I Want Freedom Now! by Claudette Colvin

by Leave a Comment

We know Ruby Bridges, Rosa Parks, Dr. King and more of the civil rights movement people, but do you know Claudette Colvin? She was a teenager who one day was sitting on the bus. She was, like Rosa after her, tired and knew her rights. She said No, I’m not giving up my seat. She would be yelled out, arrested and charged with numerous crimes (none of which were true). And her mother and preacher would bail her out of jail. But that was not […]

Woman, Mother, Interpreter, Spy

A Woman of Intelligence by Karin Tanabe

by Leave a Comment

I knew early on this was not going to be the book I expected and I mean that in a complimentary sense. I thought this would be a cozy-esque female housewife in the 50s using her wiles to navigate Manhattan cocktail parties and deduce who may or may not be a Soviet sympathizer. There’s nothing cozy about this, however. It’s a raw, intriguing look at the perils of motherhood for women in the 1950s, with a spy story tacked on in the background. The espionage […]

Campy

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: and also…This is a repeat of the dun-dun square since the book is a mystery Has America found her Tana French? Bold words to be sure. French is my favorite writer and the person I’d argue is our greatest living crime writer. Her character-driven mysteries are sumptuous masterpieces. The Hunter, her 2024 release, is an early favorite for my personal best book of this year. At the very least, I can’t imagine it falling out of the top 3. French […]

Tragically beautiful

The Naked Tree by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

by Leave a Comment

The Naked Tree by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim and Janet Hong is a graphic novel adaptation of Pak Wan-Suh’s novel of the same name. I had no idea what the book was about, but the image of the cover of a young girl, with a wind-up key in her back was enticing. It also was as bit distributing. It gave me a feeling I knew what the book was going to be about, but when I was finally able to find a copy, it turned out […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo