Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About RaRaGabor

CBR14 Participant

Public librarian reading in Western NY.

RaRaGabor's Reviews:

You’ll never look at mushrooms the same way…

The Unfamiliar Garden by Benjamin Percy

by Leave a Comment

I broke one of my personal reading rules with this book – always read a series in order. The Unfamiliar Garden is book two in The Comet Cycle…which, in my defense, I didn’t realize when I started reading it. But luckily for me, the stories in the Comet Cycle seem to be more interrelated than sequential. In this world, there was a comet. It came close enough to Earth to be amazing, but not close enough to hit. A year goes by, and the Earth’s […]

“Each of us has a monster we must confront, a monster designed to test our personal weaknesses.”

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

by 6 Comments

This book has been on my list since I read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. Hendrix takes on another staple of the horror genre here: the slasher. But in this case, the focus is on what happens to those Final Girls after the credits roll. Lynette Tarkington is a final girl. As a teen, she survived a Christmas Day massacre that saw her entire family die. Lynette is older now, but she is definitely not okay. She is a creature of caution […]

A story of profound neglect and trauma dressed up as…gumption, I guess?

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

by 8 Comments

I put off reading this book for a long time. I get really skeptical of those summer blockbuster books that everyone just loses their minds over. The only reason I ended up reading this book is because my book club picked it as their July book. For me, this book did not live up to the hype. At all. Caution: all of the spoilers ahead. Kya is the youngest child born into poverty in the North Carolina marsh. Her mother is loving, but struggling with […]

“Disclosure: My father, a drummer named Jimmy Curtis, fell in love with Opal Jewel in the summer of 1970.”

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton

by 1 Comment

This debut novel has gotten a ton of buzz, and won quite a few awards. The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is also a super slow burn. The first third of the book is an oral history of the eponymous band. The reader gathers that Opal & Nev were in many ways ahead of their time, an interracial proto-punk duo that should never have worked, but influenced the musical scene far beyond the two albums they released. We also gather that something really bad […]

“I must offer a piece of advice: ’tis dangerous to meddle in the affairs of witches”

Serpent & Dove by Shelby Mahurin

by Leave a Comment

Serpent & Dove is another Libby find, while searching for a Fantasy romance. It’s…fine! This is a young adult book (and it shows) set in a world roughly equivalent to 17th century France. Our main character, Lou (short for Louise), is a witch. She has run away from her coven to the city, and is making her living as a thief. We gather that Lou is running away from something bad, and is more or less in hiding from the members of her coven. She […]

“Be careful with the stories you tell about yourself”

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

by Leave a Comment

Untamed is a memoir. It’s also a call to arms. And a self-help book. Mostly, though, it’s the story of a woman blowing up her life to build a better one, and her interrogation of why she had a life that required blowing up in order to find happiness. Glennon Doyle has written a couple of other books, and also had a wildly successful TED talk which is all about courage and vulnerability and the armor that we put around ourselves to protect us from […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo