Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Good Thing Climate Change is a Hoax, Right? Right?

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

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cbr18bingo Refuge I kept seeing this title and I was intrigued.  Is this some sort of seacoast bodice ripper?  Well, no, actually.  But why yes it was great, and all bodices remained intact. The setting is based off of an actual place, Macquarie Island, located about half way between Tasmania and Antarctica.  It is the location of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, with a treasure chest of seeds collected world-wide for . . . just in case.  It’s only inhabited by a scientific team, and […]

“To The Lighthouse” for the Climate Change Generation

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

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A young woman named Rowan washes up on the shore of an island. The island houses a seed vault. It used to house researchers, too, but they have all left; the island’s beaches are rapidly being swallowed up by the rising sea levels, and the only people left on the island are caretaker Dominic, who lives with his three children in the lighthouse. They find Rowan and take her in, nurse her back to health. It doesn’t take long, however, before they discover that she […]

Rising Tides

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

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Dominic Salt and his three children (teenagers Raff and Fen, and their nine-year-old brother Orly) are the last living people on Shearwater Island. Dominic is the caretaker for a research lab and a seed bank housing emergency reserves of seeds for every plant species on Earth, in case of apocalypse. It’s not an idle threat in the world of Charlotte McConaghy’s novel. The waters, always rough, have lately been rising, and are threatening to swallow the island entirely. The lab has been shuttered and the […]

Would have been better without the forced thriller/mystery angle

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

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Bingo Square: Family (four of the five characters are from the same family) The setting of this novel is the best part – set on a fictional island, Shearwater, near Antarctica, it follows a family of four (father, Dominic, and three children) as they prepare to leave Shearwater forever after eight years as caretakers. Shearwater is home to one of the largest seed banks in the world, a large seal population, and once housed a thriving science community. But climate change is coming for even […]

Who would’ve thought a book about birds would be so deep?

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

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I can’t remember if I randomly found this book because I liked the author, or because I liked the narrator. Either way, I liked the narrator! This was another book that was so very long, and I didn’t really think it needed to be so long. It’s about a woman named Franny Stone. She’s obsessed with the last flock of Arctic terns, and following them on their migratory journey. She tries to talk every ship captain she meets into letting her hitch a ride on […]

Wolves rule

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

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My sister’s sister in law gave her this book to read, and then she recommended it to me. They read the hardcover version, but I totally recommend the audiobook version. The narrator is Australian, as is the main character. I think I’m a total sucker for a good accent, especially in a narrator. Anyway, let us start with some trigger warnings. There are animal deaths in this book. Going into a book about wolves, I knew that there would probably be some carnage. I asked […]



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