Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“It’s a cruel, cruel world. And the people are the worst part.”

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

by 2 Comments

In Justina Ireland’s America, nobody won the Civil War. The war simply never ended, because of the shamblers. The shamblers are the dead that rose up from the battlefields of Gettysburg and began to walk, hungry for blood and flesh. The country needed to band together to fight this new threat, and the war simply petered out. Most of the cities in the South are simply gone. Burned. Destroyed. Overrun by shamblers. The cities in the North are doing slightly better, but its hard to […]

There is literally no place in American history that’ll be awesome for me.

by Leave a Comment

REVIEW OF BOTH KINDRED (Octavia E. Butler) & DREAD NATION (Justina Ireland) It was just by chance that I happened to read Dread Nation and Kindred at the same time, but it was hard not to draw parallels between the two books.  Issues of gender, power, and the complexities of race as well as strong female narrators bind the two across the vast distance of their publication dates. Both books have interesting layers, and comparing and contrasting them would make a great literary analysis essay, but […]

A gift that keeps on giving

by 1 Comment

I’m finally getting around to reading one of the books I got in last year’s book exchange!  (And a book I am currently lending to a coworker!)  I like it, but it’s not quite what I was expecting. It kind of reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Ugly Little Boy.” In that story, scientists have pulled a Neanderthal child from the past to study it, almost like they are studying the children in The Girl With All the Gifts.     Basically, the […]

A Tamer Lucifer than Tom Ellis

by Leave a Comment

Given the intricacy and violence of the other two books in the series I’ve read, I was a little surprised at how tame Lucifer actually was in Kill the Dead. I was all ready for some kind of intricate, elaborate super-scheme when the devil hires Stark at the end of Sandman Slim for bodyguard duty. The only thing for most of the novel that Lucifer seemed to be up to was actually supervising his biopic and using that as an excuse to stay away from […]

Don’t Expect Logical Actions from Racists

by 2 Comments

Thank you so much to caitycat! I doubt I would have stumbled across this novel without her review, and I thoroughly enjoyed it despite some minor complaints about potential red herrings or loose threads. The novel is set near Baltimore in 1880.  The North never won the Civil War because of the zombie outbreak that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, leading to a quick reconciliation between the two sides to face the common threat to the survival of humanity.  Slaves were declared free, but, for […]

I really wanted to like this, but…

by Leave a Comment

So this book was suggested to me by someone (I think here in one of my other zombie book reviews, or maybe over on Pajiba).  I bought the audiobook from Amazon, and started listening to it a few weeks ago when my carpool partner was away for two weeks.  Like I said in my title – I really wanted to like it.  Unfortunately, it never really grabbed me.  The idea was solid, and I don’t know if it was just the writing style, or the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo