Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search

“Doing something even though I was scared felt kind of amazing.”

Just Roll With It by Veronica Agarwal and Lee Durfey-Lavoie

by Leave a Comment

I really loved this book and I hope it ends up getting the recognition it deserves. Just Roll With It follows Maggie during her first year of middle school as she makes new friends and gets involved with the D&D/role playing club. The main reason I got this book is that it’s a realistic and careful portrayal of OCD and anxiety, which made it a very relatable read. Both of the creators have struggled with mental health and I think it really adds to the realism […]

Two Different Viewpoints on Queer Life in Japan

I Want to be a Wall (Vol.1) by Honami Shirono

X-Gender (Vol.1) by Asuka Miyazaki

by Leave a Comment

I’m very much enjoying the wider variety of manga that’s being translated now, especially the autobiographical and LGBT+ books. These two volumes are a combination of both and I enjoyed them for different reasons. I Want to be a Wall is about an asexual woman and a gay man getting married, seemingly due to societal or family pressures. No one knows that their marriage isn’t straight but them, and the book follows them settling into married life and getting to know each other more. Their […]

Swipe Right on Mystery

The Verifiers by Jane Pek

by Leave a Comment

Claudia Lin loves mystery novels, especially the “Inspector Yuan” series. Her job lets her play detective in a low-key way: she works for a small, mysterious company called Veracity that investigates dating app customers’ matches to see if they’re the real deal. When a client comes calling with a story that seems a little off, wanting to investigate two matches that she doesn’t seem all that emotionally invested in, and then disappears, Claudia’s life suddenly gets a little more complicated. She can’t resist the urge […]

Blackout

Blackout by Dhonielle Clayton

by 5 Comments

What a great collection. I loved the idea of authors getting together to have characters set in the same place/time/date with them all spinning their individual stories. This was honestly lovely and I had no problem with any of the storylines. To have a young adult romance book starring mostly Black characters was wonderful to read. I started wishing for this to get turned into a miniseries. I miss really good romantic movies/tv shows. It feels like they have gotten out of vogue the past […]

Uneven characters in real and D&D worlds

The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi & Fantasy Role Playing Club by Doug Henderson

by Leave a Comment

The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi & Fantasy Role Playing Club has a nice premise: group of queer pals, some of whom are very different from each other, get together weekly for their D&D sessions. Most of the real world characters and issues have a generally cliché but still cute quality to them. Ben is one of the main characters, he’s gay (or at least prefers men), college graduate (degree in history) who lives with his parent and makes spending money selling pop-culture paraphernalia online. He […]

Your Familiar YA Dystopian Fiction Meets the Flavour of The Handmaid’s Tale

We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia

by Leave a Comment

I will be honest: I am not into series right now. I genuinely didn’t know that this was going to be the opener of more than one novel (I just snagged it from the “available now” section of my library app after reading a short synopsis), so when the ending was approaching I just had a feeling I knew where it was going to lead: leaving things with that particular YA dystopian ending to lead you into act II. And while this book certainly kept […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo