Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Like the Oregon Trail Game with a Bodice Ripping Mod

Emerald Fire by Julia Grice

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Fleeing her plantation home to escape her lecherous cousin, Emerald ends up joining a wagon train headed to California as a mother’s helper. She’s drawn to their guide Mace, but has a long way to go before she can reach her happy ending. More a pioneer adventure than a true romance, we follow Emerald on her way west as the train tangles with illness and injury, hostile Native Americans and a pair of bank robbers. We encounter all kinds of curious characters both on and […]

Perhaps the most American of novels.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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In 1905, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan was published to massive sales and widespread scorn. The book was supportive of segregation, and glorified not only the Confederacy, but the Klan it was purporting to tell the story of. One year later, mobs of white Atlantans massacred African Americans following lurid and unfounded accusations made in local newspapers about the alleged rape of four white women at the hands of black men. At least 25 black people were murdered […]

CBR15 Bingo: Sex (Bingo AND Cannonball)

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey

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CBR15 Bingo: Sex (the protagonist is a god-touched masochist courtesan spy) Kushiel’s Dart is the first novel in the Kushiel’s Legacy series, which came to number six books in total. Jacqueline Carey also wrote an additional trilogy in her Terre D’Ange universe, and over the course of all of her books, pretty much explored every continent in her alternate-history fantasy world. This first book is set in an alternate historical version of Europe, set at about Renaissance times, or somewhat earlier, although the descriptions of […]

A multi-generational exploration of Black experience from the early days of the slave trade through modern day.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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CBR 15 Bingo: Africa – The book begins, ends, and half of it takes place in Africa. Yaa Gyasi begins Homegoing with a pair of sisters (Effia Otcher and Esi Asare) separated at birth at the height of the African slave trade.  One sister, Effia, is raised and married off to a white Englishman on the Gold Coast.  The other sister, Esi, stays in a tribal African village.  The story covers seven generations. Each chapter is a new person advancing down the timeline and alternates between […]

Beauty and the Beast, Shackled

Marvelous by Molly Greeley

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CBR 15 Bingo: Bodies, Bodies – Most everyone in this book is concerned with Petrus’s body – specifically the coat of hair that covers all of it. Pedro, a young boy with the rare condition that caused him to be covered with hair from head to foot, is bought as a gift for the French king, and eventually is married to Catherine, the beautiful daughter of a penniless merchant. I have heard of the story of Petrus Gonsalvus, but only in passing, merely the fact […]

Demons and wizards and magic – oh my!

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

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4.5 stars Bree Matthews applied to an early admissions residential program at the same college that her mother attended, only to discover that her mother strongly objected to her going there. They had a blistering argument, and Bree’s mother died in a car accident before they had a chance to settle things. Bree blames herself for her mother driving when angry. Her grief and guilt are overwhelming, so Bree hopes that being away from home is the best way forward. She has barely arrived at […]



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