Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search this Site

“Welcome to the future! The future stinks.” (Your Pal Fred)

Your Pal Fred Volume One by Michael Rex

Doom’s Day Camp V02 The Story Eater by Joshua Hauke

by Leave a Comment

I had an odd reading arc at the end of 2023. I  found some not overly happy books. One was a book about Palestine and Gaza, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, and  two books about the apocalypse. Not to mention the teen novel about a “camp” to train teenage assassins. However, there was humor in the two apocalypse books. In Your Pal Fred Volume One, Michael Rex made a character that is from the past. He wakes up in the seriously dystopian world of […]

Just Walk Forward

Last Flight by Kristen Mai Giang

by Leave a Comment

From Publisher Description of Last Flight by Kristen Mai Giang: On April 24, 1975 the last flight out of Saigon, Vietnam carried over 400 people to the United States, six days before Saigon’s surrender to the North Vietnamese Army.  I was a few months old in April, therefore, I obviously have no memory of this happening. However, when I learned that the war was still basically going and I was alive for it, it was an eye opener. I had always heard about the Vietnam […]

Ducking ducks and Women in Pants!

Mr. McCloskey’s Marvelous Mallards: The Making of Make Way for Ducklings by Emma Bland Smith

Cloaked in Courage: Uncovering Deborah Sampson, Patriot Soldier by Beth Anderson

by Leave a Comment

This tale by Emma Bland Smith is the one that imagines how things went when Robert McCloskey decided to write Make Way For Ducklings. Their take is a bit poetic license I am sure, however Mr. McCloskey’s Marvelous Mallards: The Making of Make Way for Ducklings, is a fun way to see how one of his most famous works was made. From real ducklings to full grown ducks; from editors not willing to take the “okay” and from his own need to have things perfect, […]

CBR15 Bingo: Politics

Jingo by Terry Pratchett

by Leave a Comment

4.5 stars CBR15 Bingo: Politics (the word is used 18 times over the course of the novel) Official book description: It isn’t much of an island that rises up one moonless night from the depths of the Circle Sea — just a few square miles of silt and some old ruins. Unfortunately, the historically disputed lump of land called Leshp is once again floating directly between Ankh-Morpork and the city of Al-Khali on the coast of Klatch — which is spark enough to ignite that […]

“No one survives a war’s front lines without ghosts clinging to them.”

Angels of the Pacific by Elise Hooper

by Leave a Comment

CBR 15 Bingo – Hold Steady: To survive the war, Tess and Flor have to make a stand and hold steady in their efforts to undermine the Japanese occupiers. After Japan invades and occupies the Philippines during WW2, American nurse Tess and Filipino university student Flor must do whatever they can to survive and help those around them. In my ongoing quest to find WW2 historical novels which don’t simply rehash the experience of the London Blitz or the French resistance, I have looked to the […]

Crashing Off the Rails

The Orphan's Letters by Glynis Peters

by Leave a Comment

Kitty, an orphaned young woman, works to gain her Red Cross qualification as she continues to work as a nurse during World War Two. I picked up this ARC on NetGalley a while ago, and came to realize sometime after that that WW2 historical fiction is generally not for me. I enjoy learning about the time period and the experiences of ordinary people, but I find that the plots zigzag between melodramatic and dull too much for my liking. But my NetGalley shelf needs to […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo