Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the Yay for YA Discussion About YA Books Now  

Slightly Baffled

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

by Leave a Comment

Warning: here be spoilers America, sometime in the near future. Astrobiologist Theo Byrne raises his son Robin alone after the death of his wife. He feels like he’s doing a terrible job, especially when Robin is sent home from school for smashing his only friend’s face with a thermos. Robin is a complicated child; intelligent but suffering from Aspergers, ADHD, OCD and probably a few other things. Theo is weary to accept the decision; Robin’s school, meanwhile, is pushing him to put the boy on […]

Oh no….

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

by Leave a Comment

Oh no. Oh nooo. It’s a series. Those were my exact words upon doing a cursory Google search prior to starting this review. In prepping to tear into The Rosie Project, I learned that there are two follow-ups that I don’t think my morbid curiosity will let me not read. To answer my previous question of if I’m a masochist: yes. Why else would I suffer through multiple seasons of dreadful Dexter and Archer simply because I’d already devoted so many years of my time to the shows? Why […]

A glimmer of hope to all the teens who are a little bit off…

The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily by Laura Creedle

by Leave a Comment

Abelard and Lily are both neurodivergent. Abelard has Asperger’s and Lily has ADHD. Abelard fixes things and Lily destroys them.  After an awkward kiss, a trip to detention and with the aid of a worn copy The Letters of Abelard and Heloise the two fall hard for each other. I thought of Abelard, under the same anxious impulse to touch everything in the world of the here and now that we could feel with our hands. But unlike me, he was thinking about the hidden […]

The Convenience of Individuality

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

by Leave a Comment

This is one of those strange little books that I found reaffirmed my belief in the idea of being true to yourself. There are a lot of platitudes about that concept, mostly Disney-fied or Rom-Comish in execution, and those platitudes always ring hollow to me. They seem sacharine, or manipulative, or frustratingly narrow in execution. What Sayaka Murata offers in Convenience Store Woman is a character so out of synch with the rest of her society, but so in synch with the world of her […]

How to achieve “closure” with great “finesse”

by Leave a Comment

I downloaded Mockingbird from the library the other day, not really realizing that it was a YA book – actually it’s a middle grade book – until I was in to it, and by then, I was in to it, and couldn’t put it down. In fact, I finished it within a couple of days, even sneaking in a few minutes here and there at work. It grabbed me from the first page and didn’t let go. It also broke my heart. Ten year old […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo