Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I had to start this book over again four times before I could get into it, but it was worth it in the end.

The Witness for the Dead (The Goblin Emperor, #2) by Katherine Addison

by Leave a Comment

You’ve really got to give this one a minute. Similarly to the way I felt about Addison’s first novel (under this penname at least) The Goblin Emperor, the names and the naming system and the worldbuilding are A LOT. Unlike with The Goblin Emperor, there is no glossary, and we are not joining a world as the fish out of water along with the main character like we were with Maia in the previous book. Our main character here, Thara Celehar, a Witness for the […]

LAish

City of Bones by Michael Connelly

by Leave a Comment

The thing with Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels is that I can tell in the first 20 pages if it’s going to be a good one or not. Trunk Music and Concrete Blonde are examples of the good ones, A Darkness More Than Night and Angel’s Flight less so. One just seems to know in advance how Connelly is going to hit his beats and if said beats are going to work with you. This one really worked for me and, while almost all of Connelly’s novels are set in Los Angeles, this […]

What does the dark dark wood got to do with it?

In A Dark Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

by Leave a Comment

It’s one of those books where the “mysterious events of the past” are mysterious only because the narrator isn’t telling you about it. Leonora, 26 years old is a crime author and lives a solitary and lonely life.  Then, she receives an email from a woman she does not know, inviting her to a “hen party” for a friend she has not spoken to for a long time.  But she goes.  This hen party is for the wedding of Leonora’s childhood friend Clare.  A wedding […]

By now, the plots are all starting to blend together a bit

Shifters in the Night by Molly Harper

by 2 Comments

I was happily surprised when logging into Audible to discover that there was a new Mystic Bayou book out. Ever since a video went viral of a shifter going raging in a parking lot, the world at large has become aware that supernatural creatures exist and live among them. The existence of Mystic Bayou, a little southern town where humans and supernatural beings co-exist happily has also become public, and it’s bringing in a lot more visitors, both through tourism and people who want to […]

For Three!

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander

Vera Kelly Is Not A Mystery by Rosalie Knecht

Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A Team, A Championship Season by Dean Bartoli Smith

by Leave a Comment

Knocked out three books this weekend, all of which I enjoyed to varying degrees…   The Book of Three A cute, charming fantasy novel. Perhaps a little too derivative of LOTR (the wolf-like character might as well have been called “Gollum”) but still entertaining and occasionally refreshing when compared to the rest of the genre. I also enjoyed a compelling female character that had autonomy without having to be everyone’s Hashtag Badass Woman (in other words: I appreciate a male writer who can write a […]

The Rights of Women and Machines

The Haunting of Tramcar 015 by P. Djeli Clark

by Leave a Comment

Bingo 14: Machinery The Haunting of Tramcar 015 takes place in the same world as many of the author’s other works, a steampunk alternative history version of Cairo. The titular tramcar is a major part of the setting, the plot, and we even get some attention to the technical specs on how the tech is supposed to work; thus I would argue this novella/novelette qualifies for the technology focus square. The other reason for the label is that there’s a pretty detailed discussion of whether […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo