Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“This is the year where if you are not careful, you could stand to lose it all. There will be one pregnancy, one funeral, and one marriage. A complete turn around the sun by the next Lunar year. But you must fix your relationship with everyone. And I mean everyone in your family. Starting with your daughters.”

The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh

by Leave a Comment

This was a fun one. The author has said in interviews that she wanted to portray the complexities of Vietnamese American/diaspora relationships between women, and she wanted the women to be messy and make mistakes and have a really hard time not making the same mistakes again and again. So she wrote about a family of cursed Vietnamese women! From the blurb: “Everyone in Orange County’s Little Saigon knew that the Duong sisters were cursed. It started with their ancestor, Oanh, who dared to leave […]

CBR15 Passport! Book #1 – A book that is Not For Moi.

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

by 9 Comments

Oof, this was not for me. Like, so not for me that I maybe shouldn’t even be writing a review, because my brain just bounced off this after about ten pages and then just kept bouncing harder and harder. This is a speculative fiction, experimental novel by British poet Salena Godden about an anthropomorphized version of Death (here called Mrs. Death, personified by an older Black woman) and her connections to/conversations with a person called Wolf. In addition to the the prose actually feeling like […]

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

by Leave a Comment

I will admit that I have been avoiding this book since it was published, but especially after I read a Sherlock fanfic one time* that was a riff on Life After Life, and which is one of the most emotionally traumatizing fics I’ve ever read, so by association I was pre-traumatized by this book. Also, one time I read the first Jackson Brodie mystery and I thought it was boring, so I thought this would be boring too. Happily, wrong on all fronts! *If you […]

“They were supposed to grow up with their hands in each other’s pockets, compensating for one another’s weaknesses, encouraging one another’s strengths.”

Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1) by Seanan McGuire

by Leave a Comment

This was my first Seanan McGuire book, which is a little unbelievable, both because she writes in genres I love, and because she writes so very prolifically. And I started with a really good one. I’m not against spoilers and frequently spoil myself for things, but I went into this book almost completely unspoiled, even for the premise, and I think that’s the way to go. The book is so weird it’s almost impossible to really sum up in a blurb anyway. So, how to […]

“Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.”

Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M. Valente

by 2 Comments

My initial reaction upon finishing Comfort Me With Apples was “wtf was this.” I’m not sure what I was going to rate it or say about it before my book club meeting, but something one of the other members said during the meeting sort of flipped a little switch in my brain and clarified my feelings and thoughts about it. This was a weird effing book. Especially if you go in thinking you know what the main premise is, but you really don’t as it turns out, […]

“I’d follow a clown into a storm drain if he had a baby goat in pajamas.”

Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez

by Leave a Comment

Objectively Part of Your World is probably closer to four stars, but I had a really good time with it so I’m giving it five. This book was so uplifting and charming and cozy and swoony. Firstly, before we get to plot, probably good to know that this takes place in a very, very, very light sff atmosphere, so there will have to be some suspension of disbelief, but honestly that’s not hard to do here (the idea, I think, was to try to create an approximation […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo