Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About jeverett15

CBR 8
CBR 9
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant
CBR17 Participant
CBR17 Levels

39 years old. New Jersey resident. Fan of mystery novels, classic literature, and non-fiction about movies, television, sports, and American history.

jeverett15's Reviews:

Queen, Tangerine, Kind of a Bore

The Chinese Orange Mystery by Ellery Queen

by Leave a Comment

The Chinese Orange Mystery is the perfect ammunition for people who don’t like mysteries. It goes all-in on all of the most annoying tropes of mystery novels, the ones that drive non-fans nuts. The characters are paper-thin, the dialogue is stilted and almost entirely expository, the plotting is entirely consumed by the puzzle without any consideration of the reality of murder. The detective, Ellery Queen, is an insufferable fop who refuses to ever disclose what he is thinking or who he suspects of the crime. […]

Stranger King

Revival by Stephen King

by Leave a Comment

A six-year-old boy playing with his toy soldiers in the front yard is interrupted by a visitor, the new minister at the family church. The Rev. Charles Jacobs is bright and energetic, with his pretty wife and young son completing a picture-perfect family. The six-year-old, Jamie Morton, will become enthralled by Jacobs and his twin passions, for God and electricity. Conducting youth service in the church basement, Rev. Jacobs spices up his scripture lessons with his various electrical toys and experiments, including a toy Jesus […]

The Sherlock of East Long Beach

Righteous by Joe Ide

by Leave a Comment

Righteous, Joe Ide’s second novel to feature Isaiah (“IQ”) Quintabe, follows the neighborhood detective as he continues the investigation into his brother’s murder while also being dragged by an old friend into a dangerous new case. When his dead brother’s girlfriend Sarita calls him out of the blue IQ knows she must need something. It turns out her sister Janine is in terrible trouble out in Las Vegas, owing money to a dangerous loan shark whose already threatened her boyfriend. When Janine and her boyfriend […]

The Great Pretender

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

by Leave a Comment

The first Vonnegut book I read was Slaughterhouse Five. I was 14 and a friend of mine was reading it and back then I couldn’t stand the idea that any of my friends might be better read than I was so I had to run out and get a copy. I read it faster than seems possible now, and within a few years I had read everything else Vonnegut published, all the novels, the short story collections, his essays, everything. He’s the only author for […]

Abnormally Good

Normal People by Sally Rooney

by 4 Comments

Somebody saw me carrying Sally Rooney’s new novel, Normal People, and asked me what it was about. In the moment I was a little stymied. This person was just looking to make casual conversation in an elevator, not hear my detailed analysis. I wound up just telling him it was about a rich girl and a working-class boy and their on-again, off-again relationship. Despite being true, that’s woefully inadequate. So here’s what Normal People is about: It’s about all the ways we hurt other people […]

Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

by Leave a Comment

Dorothy B. Hughes was a popular crime writer of the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps the best female crime writer of her day and, based on the prose and psychological complexity on display in this slim volume, very much the equal of her better-known male peers. A very perceptive afterword written by the mystery novelist Megan Abbot does a better job elucidating the feminist aspects of the book than I could hope to, so let me just say that In A Lonely Place is a necessary […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo