Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Ellesfena

CBR 8
CBR 9
CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant
CBR17 Participant

I mostly read nonfiction (especially public health-related), mysteries, and fantasy. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Ellesfena's Quick Questions interview.)

Ellesfena's Reviews:

Me and my pagan crew

Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw

by Leave a Comment

CBR Bingo: Fresh Start I chose Strange Practice for my Fresh Start square because I was really intrigued by the premise. Unfortunately, it ended up being kind of disappointing and I probably won’t continue the series. Strange Practice is the first Dr. Greta Helsing book, a mystery series that focuses on a London doctor whose patients are all supernatural. Dr. Helsing treats demons with chronic coughs, injured ghouls, arthritic barrow-wights, and any other supernatural creature you could think of. As the story opens there’s a […]

Money, it’s a crime

The Assistants by Camille Perri

by Leave a Comment

CBR12 Bingo: Money! If this didn’t fit so perfectly into a Bingo square, I probably wouldn’t bother to review it. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to finish reading it. Tina Fontana is the personal assistant to Robert Barlow, an all-powerful media executive who basically the controls the news. He’s a billionaire, she makes $40,000 a year (Do men like Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch really pay their assistants so poorly? Eat the rich). A mistake on an expense report leaves her with an extra check […]

Just lovely

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

by 2 Comments

CBR12 Bingo: Cannonballer Says Man, am I thankful I read and took to heart ardaigle’s glowing review of this book. I had this checked out from my library before I even finished reading the review. And I really loved it. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is kind of hard to summarize. It’s about Lori Gottlieb’s career path that led her to becoming a psychologist. It’s about her own experiences being in therapy when she was going through a personal crisis. It’s about some of […]

Please Send Help

The Next to Die by Sophie Hannah

by 4 Comments

Bingo: Reader’s Choice, replacing the Roaring 20s square Everyone makes mistakes, but I now have to spend my Sunday night grappling with the fact that I chose to read this book of my own free will. I am not okay. It seems like the general consensus is that Sophie Hannah’s first few Spilling CID mysteries were okay–at least worth reading if you like that sort of thing. I certainly did–I remember tearing through the first three or four. I kept reading after that, even with […]

Women, Brave as Stars at Dawn

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

by Leave a Comment

Bingo: UnCannon Several years ago I read Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat. As I recall, I was in tears by the end of the first chapter. It is a beautiful, unbearably sad book. Breath, Eyes, Memory is in the same vein (and once again, I was crying before I was even 30 pages in). It’s the story of Sophie, who is being raised in Haiti by her aunt, as her mother has emigrated to New York. When the story starts Sophie is about 12 […]

No Surprises

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

by Leave a Comment

Bingo: Red I read recently that people who tend toward anxiety prefer to watch TV shows and movies that they’ve already seen, because then there’s no anxiety about how things turn out. I think this is true for books, too. I would always, always, prefer to read something I’ve read before–even if I didn’t love it the first time around. I think this is one reason I always return to Anne Tyler–even if it’s a book of hers that I’ve never read before, I know […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo