Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Nyx

CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant

Lasped reader and writer hoping that CBR can help me get back into both.

Nyx's Reviews:

Even supervillains love their kids

The Complete Runaways Vol. 1 (1-18) by Brian K. Vaughn

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The Runaways has always been on my to-do list ever since my husband read them and raved about it. Unfortunately, I tried watching a few episodes the TV adaptation and my interest cooled. Since then it’s just been sitting on my  “get around to it eventually” list. Enter Rainbow Rowell. She did what she always does and motivated me to actually do the thing. Everywhere I turn, her run of the Runaways is racking up praise and I, being the completionist I am, decided that […]

Sweet tea in book form

Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe by Heather Webber

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With three days to go before vacation I had nothing lined up for my annual beach read. Thankfully, right before I left I received an ARC copy of Heather Webber’s new book Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe. Many of us are familiar with the source material of that is at the kernel of this novel. All you need to do is search the section of your brain that stores childhood nursery rhymes  and up will pop the following: “Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket […]

You can’t get there from here

Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron

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For the past few years, my husband and I have made a concerted effort to be a family that goes away for week-long summer vacation. So we save up all year and spend the beginning of July in the sleepy Maine beach town my husband grew up going to as a child and teenager. I love it but each time we go I’m struck by how no matter how much we try to explore during each visit we can only scratch the surface of all the […]

Who doesn’t like a sci-fi romp?

Head On by John Scalzi

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Recently on twitter, John Scalzi shared a one-star review of one of his books he found. In the review, the writer was upset that Scalzi wrote easily readable sci-fi “romps”. Like me, Scalzi had a hard time finding why writing something that could be described as a romp would be bad. Romps are usually fun, right? Anyway, all of this is to say that Scalzi’s second foray into the world he established in Lock-in is fun, slick and dare I say another romp. Head On, […]

My annoyance with Jefferson continues

Founding Gardners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf

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What can the founding fathers’ gardens tell you about them and early America? According to Andrea Wulf everything! Taking what could be a dry topic, Wulf digs into the botanical side of history to show how the farms and gardens of each of the founding fathers were microcosms of how they wished to shape America. Washington, the reluctant general and post-war president, focuses on popularizing native species and developing a distinctly American farm. Jefferson loves the theory of planning an elaborate plantation but struggles with […]

Get lured in by the world-building, stay for the intersectional dissection of oppression

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?” Most people don’t deeply question (cough, Kanye, cough) why enslaved people “allowed” themselves to remain enslaved. But most of us also don’t dwell deeply on what systematic physical and psychological trauma would be needed to keep a whole class of people oppressed and how that trauma may ripple out generationally. And why would we? Envisioning something like that is […]



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