Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About booktrovert

CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant

I'm a special education teacher by day and a reader by most other hours. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Booktrovert's Quick Questions interview.)

booktrovert's Reviews:

I want you to know how it feels.

The Furrows by Namwali Serpell

by 1 Comment

This book isn’t about what happened. It’s an elegy, a lament for the dead. It’s strange and metaphoric. It shifts often, switching perspective, characters, even plot, so that the experience of reading almost feels like floating (or struggling through) a wave. I selected this book because I really loved The Old Drift, and I would still highly recommend that novel. This novel is different from that one in almost every way, but for the fact that it was written by the same talented writer. Overall, despite […]

Love is both a constant and a variable

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

by 1 Comment

I wish I had waited just a day to write my best-of list, because I would absolutely add this book. I loved being in this world, with these characters. Sam and Sadie meet when they are young, in a children’s hospital, in the 1980s – the time of The Oregon Trail (among other games). Sam is a patient, recovering from a terrible car accident that will have life-long repercussions for his feet (not to mention his mental state). Sadie’s older sister Alice has cancer (a […]

“And the system cannot survive the shock.”

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

by 2 Comments

The reviews for this book have been so very mixed – people either really loved it (best book of the year!) or were really frustrated by it. I think a key distinction in the tone of reviews boils down to how much science fiction you were looking for when you cracked open these ambitious pages. If your heart is more invested in the science fiction / fantasy elements, you’re likely to be disappointed by this novel that chooses to focus much more on characters than […]

Rise.

The Trees by Percival Everett

by Leave a Comment

What if the dead don’t have to stay dead? How do we deal with tragedy so vast, and so systematic, so enshrined in our institutions? Percival Everett’s novel The Trees responds to that question by positing a world in which the past won’t stay buried. In Money, Mississippi (a place I had to look up to verify it’s reality, despite its imaginary qualities in this novel) the local cops are faced with a series of strange murders. This fictional version of Money is home to Carolyn […]

Lessons in Self-Care

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis

by 6 Comments

This weekend I finished two books that felt like generous hugs. The first is the extremely popular Lessons in Chemistry. This book tells the story of Elizabeth Zott – a chemist who quietly and fiercely determines that she will not be relegated to all things feminine because she is a woman (and though the book says it doesn’t matter, it points out on multiple occasions that not only is Elizabeth Zott a woman, she’s a beautiful woman). She’s brilliant but also incredibly immune to societal stereotypes about […]

Try this one in the summer

A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion

by Leave a Comment

This novel was pretty good, but for some reason I expected something completely different going in. Will I ever learn – expectations about any novel are a surefire way to be a disappointed reader. I picked this book up because it was suggested as thriller – and I assumed it would work well as a somewhat spooky novel. It’s not spooky at all! I’d say this is more YA with only a mere hint of thriller, but mostly a coming-of-age novel with slightly heightened stakes. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo