Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

It means ‘from me to you’

Kimi ni Todoke vols. 1-25, 27-30 by Karuho Shiina

Kimi ni Todoke vol. 26 by Karuho Shiina

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CBR18 Bingo – 26: volume 26 was all about my favorite character. The primary conflict of Kimi ni Todoke is that the protagonist looks like the girl from The Ring. Sawako’s name even resembles the girl from The Ring’s – Sadako. Because of her pale skin and evil blunt bangs, Sawako has never been able to make many friends, despite being the sweetest darling in the universe. But things change in high school. Generally, it’s a love story. The romance between Sawako and Kazehaya is […]

Come for the cover, stay for the history lesson

Armaveni by Nadine Takvorian

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CBR18 Bingo – Bird: a history teacher who deserves to be given one. And the phoenix and crane gave me enough words to review this book. But mostly the teacher. Armaveni is about Nadine finding her family’s history. It’s based on the author Nadine Takvorian’s own life and the author notes what she changed for the narrative. Most of that was temporally condensing her experiences and making herself younger than she really was when she experienced them. Nadine is an Armenian-American girl in high school. […]

A promising start to a new series

Witch Season by Julia Bianco

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CBR18 Bingo: Refuge (The Aestas coven works hard to be a safe haven and refuge for young witches who have snapped and would normally be ostracised by other witches) Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for this ARC. This book is on sale now. There are two types of witches (in this world, all magic users are called witches, regardless of gender). The ones who are born from families with established magic, who grew up as part of a coven, and who are […]

When Lovecraft Comes to Leeds

The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross

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One of the issues with the main protagonist ‘leveling up’ is that it can make them harder to write into a story. Bob Howard, who has been the main protagonist of the Laundry Files up until this point, was at the receiving end of both a career and supernatural-power advancement at the end of The Rhesus Chart. And this probably made it harder for Stross the write the same kinds of stories  he had been up until that point. So for The Nightmare Stacks, he […]

Yabba Dabba Ghost

Diary of a Dinoghost V01Unlikely Friends by Monica Arnaldo

Diary of a Dinoghost V02 Sworn Enemies by Monica Arnaldo

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I had a list of online reader copies. And Diary of a Dinoghost boos …   I mean books … one and two kept coming up. I figured I had a few days to read them as the first Unlikely Friends was due in August 2026 and two is due in November 2026 under the name, Sworn Enemies. They are both written and illustrated by Monica Arnaldo and are part of the A Branches Book grouping. Anyway, I kept putting them off, but one day […]

Please, DON’T send in the clown

Hamlet is Not OK by R.A. Spratt

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As a teen (at least 13 and up), Hamlet is Not OK by R.A. Spratt and I would have been friends. This is because I, too, would have had some of the naive ideas about violence and mental health our main character has. Now, I still am not keen on violence as the solution and I understand the difficulties of mental health, but if you change Hamlet (and SPOILER, they do) you have changed practically everything that has come after that was inspired by it, […]



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