Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search

If 28 Days Later and The Road had a daughter

The Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

by Leave a Comment

This was Round 2 of my ongoing “what’s going in in the world of Irish science fiction?” quest. (Round 1 was here.) First off: great title, no? I was instantly intrigued, especially with the description, and I liked this weird sense I was getting of the post-apocalypse as a site of feminist possibility rather than just endless misogyny and threatened sexual violence. (Sigh.) The premise is straightforward: Orpen lives with her mother and her mother’s partner, Maeve, on an isolated island off the coast of […]

Bad Moon Rising

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

by Leave a Comment

The ultimate destination wedding.  The most gorgeous and trendy couple.  And, oh right, murder. The couple is Jules Keegen, sleek and gorgeous publisher of the online magazine, The Download, and Will Slater, star of the hit live-action show, Survive the Night.  On the bride’s side, there is her half-sister, Olivia, frail mentally and physically, and estranged from her sister.  On the groom’s side, there is a squad of his posh school classmates, rowdy and feral, very much a set of Lord of Flies chaps.  And […]

‘Cause I’m right here, right here, right here at home

The Searcher by Tana French

by 1 Comment

Retired Chicago police detective Cal Hooper looks back on his life – divorced, stuck in a job that makes him increasingly uncomfortable – and decides to buy a fixer-upper in the small town of Artnakelty, Ireland. As he’s working on his house he’s approached by Trey, a twelve year old from a family widely regarded as no good by the villagers. Trey asks Cal to look into the disappearance of his older brother and Cal, reluctantly, starts to to investigate. But he’s an outsider in […]

My first non Murder Squad Tana French, and I still liked it

The Searcher by Tana French

by 4 Comments

In 2020, I was super excited to read a Tana French book I found in my (virtual) bookshelf that I thought I had not yet read.  To my disappointment, it was just one of her (in my opinion) lesser novels, that now, a mere one year later, I have forgotten the ending to again.  This time, I made sure that this wasn’t a repeat.  EIther way, I’m sure that this would have been a memorable book because it is the most different from all other […]

“It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance.”

Mr Salary by Sally Rooney

by Leave a Comment

Oof. Sally Rooney can do more with 22 pages than others can do with 200. Sukie and Nathan are set to collide. They have been tangled up in each other’s lives since she was an infant and he attended her christening. Sukie’s mother is dead, her father is dying, and she has been living on-and-off with Nathan since she was 19. He’s older, wiser, and much wealthier. She’s been in Boston, and he picks her up from the airport. They are charged from the get […]

“She wondered, for the thousandth time, who got to decide one tradition was right and another was wrong.”

The Butchers' Blessing by Ruth Gilligan

by Leave a Comment

What makes a tradition a tradition? How and when do we pass from routine to ritual, and ritual to sacred rite? How do we decide what it kept, what is left behind, and what must be destroyed for the good of the future? Ruth Gilligan knows, but she will not give us any easy answers. Instead, she gives us snapshots; a literal photograph  sets us in motion, but glimpses into the life of “modern Ireland” connect the pieces by stringing one red knot to another. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo