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:

Motivation to clean out my TBR

The Maid by Nita Prose

by Leave a Comment

I love stories with neuro-atypical protagonists, and I enjoy a good buddy caper. I enjoy mysteries of all kinds, I don’t mind when things get dark and creepy (think, Silvia Moreno Garcia, or Tana French). But I also enjoy something more like Only Murders in the Building – a very real murder to solve, but somehow conveying a light-hearted tone. Cozy mysteries can be lovely – but they can also veer into some tricky territory, because somehow the author has to make us care about […]

All ghosts were once alive

The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

by Leave a Comment

I read Jane Eyre many, many years ago, when I was around 13 or 14 I think – long enough ago that I don’t recall exactly the experience of reading the novel itself beyond vague memories of the language being stuffy. I’ve seen iterations of the novel in many different movies and television shows over the years – I think most of us know the basic story by now (and if you don’t, Wikipedia will gladly spoil the novel for you, or provide a sufficient reminder […]

What is space to you?

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

by Leave a Comment

This is very much my preferred type of science fiction – give me more character development and philosophical musings, and less dramatic space wars. If you are someone who enjoys science fiction generally, but finds yourself loving the middle act scene setting and sort of skimming the inevitable third act fight scenes, this book is for you, too. I have not had the pleasure of reading Becky Chambers’ Wayaferers series – and now these books are on my library queue, eagerly awaited. Chambers gives us […]

Familiar plot, new characters

Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski

by Leave a Comment

I’ve stumbled into a book time-warp – many books I’ve read recently seem to be set in the late 1990s. It’s an interesting choice – I wonder if the authors are deliberately trying to set their work in a space before the world changed with everything that happened between 9/11 and Covid. I grew up hearing the adults around me talk about  the “simpler time” of their own youth, and I think I’ve reached a stage where I can also reminisce about a relatively more […]

“People aren’t alone, and they never have been.”

The Overstory by Richard Powers

by Leave a Comment

  I don’t think I intended to read this book in April, but the fact that it seemed to be calling from my ever-growing TBR pile (and the library began sending notices that I was out of renewals for this one). It’s length is a little intimidating – at 500 pages, it had the potential to create a bottleneck in moving through that TBR pile. While for me, April is not an ideal month for reading (especially not this year, as more people and events […]

Whose history?

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

by Leave a Comment

I picked this book up because it was on a list of “perfect short novels” mentioned in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. There are always so many new books coming out that excite me, so it can be tough to add anything to my TBR pile that isn’t contemporary. I have really been loving books written by poets lately, and really wanting something short to balance out the longer books I’ve been reading. This should have fit right in, but ultimately this wasn’t a book for […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo