Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Why True Crime Now?

Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer by Harold Schechter

Murderabilia: A History of Crime in 100 Objects by Harold Schechter

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Maniac – 3.5 stars Decades before the modern school shooter burst onto the national stage, a man in Bath, Michigan blew up his local elementary school because he resented that his taxes had been increased to help build and maintain it. This is such a strange and shocking crime that it’s hard to understand why it’s also rather little known, but Schechter makes a compelling case for why it has mostly faded into the shadowy corners of history. He does a good job of recreating […]

CBR BINGO: Or—😡😭😤

Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

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A book about a female serial killer? Um, not really. This is the story of a lonely little girl who bad things happen to and she turns into a lonely old woman. But heartwarming? I’m giving this a grudging 3.75 stars, bumped up 0.25 from 3.5 because it wrung salty tears out of me. They were dripping down my face, but I was upset about it. This book was so great until the ending, when it did three things I didn’t like (and almost never […]

Don’t judge a movie by its book

The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

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Did Joe R. Lansdale have Peter Dinklage in mind when he wrote the character Shorty’s look, or was I projecting? Maybe a bit of one, a lot of the other. You see, the novel, The Thicket, only came to be on my TBR list because I had seen the movie starring Dinklage. I won’t go into that too much, but will say it is not a horrible movie as it had its moments, and I had fun picking apart those, “You did that?” scenes. But […]

Enterprising Women on Shadowy Paths

Forbidden Fruit: The Secret, Scandalous History of Contraception and Abortion by Jessica Cale

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara Lodge

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Forbidden Fruit: The Secret, Scandalous History of Contraception and Abortion by Jessica Cale – 3.5 stars CBR18 Bingo: You – As a woman living in the United States, the history and the laws surrounding contraception and abortion are very important to me. Though lawmakers today would have you believe that contraception and abortion are only recent inventions, in fact they have a long history. With the recent attacks on access to abortion and contraception in the United States, it is somewhat reassuring to learn about how […]

Tracks can be followed

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring by Patrick Horvath and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

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Back in November 2025 I found out that book two in the Beneath the Trees series was having a second volume. I tend not to pre order that far in advance, but I said, Screw it! This gal will have her day…. ah book!   And in July 2026  Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring by Patrick Horvath, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, and a few others, came out. Okay, yes it is good, but I had built up volume one so much and had such […]

Red for Murder

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

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When She Woke, by Hillary Jordan, is a work of speculative fiction, that I imagine feels far less speculative today than when it was published in 2011. The author doesn’t specify the year of our Lord in which this novel takes place, but it’s definitely in the future. Los Angeles has been nuked to filth. There are water wars in Northern Africa. There are “National Identity Cards” which allow the government to monitor and track citizenry. And there was a “superclap” pandemic which did nothing […]



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