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:

Scars of war and colonialism

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a copy of The Hacienda since January. I expected gothic horror, and what I got was a full-on haunted house story. Set in Mexico just after the Mexican War of Independence, the scars of that war are visible everywhere. Beatriz, our main character, is forced to move in with relatives after her father, a general on the wrong side of the war, is disappeared and their house burned down in the night. Beatriz sees her only hope […]

“Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts.” Oh, buddy. You were so close.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

by 12 Comments

This is another series that my husband has been reading forever, and I just never picked one up until now. Storm Front is the first of 25 planned books (19 are currently out). The set-up is similar in a lot of ways to Midnight Riot: Harry Dresden is a Wizard living in Chicago, and working more or less as a private detective. He is also on retainer to Chicago PD for those cases that are just a little too…out there. In classic noir fashion, a […]

“Maybe one day I’ll live somewhere and then I’ll have an address and I’ll send you a picture postcard and you can put it in your damn address book, since you seem so damn concerned about it.”

Killing Floor by Lee Child

by Leave a Comment

My husband has been reading the Jack Reacher series forever, and when the new Amazon series came out, we watched it together. The series is a perfect summer binge – full of action, enough plot to hold things together, but not so much you have to work particularly hard to follow along. I have an upcoming “beach reads” presentation for work, so I thought I’d give the first Jack Reacher book a shot – and it is the perfect beach read. Jack Reacher recently mustered […]

The Grifter and the Heiress

Pretty Things by Janelle Brown

by Leave a Comment

The goodreads description of this book uses phrases like “scam of a lifetime” “page turner” and “dazzling, twisty, mesmerizing.” My experience of this book was…quite different. Nina is the only child of a con-woman mother. Though determined to make a straight living, her mother’s recurring illness has pushed her to the wrong side of the law: stealing antiques from the rich and selling them on the black market. Vanessa is an heiress without much smarts or ambition, “self made” as an Instagram Influencer. When Nina […]

When can I preorder book 3???

Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

by Leave a Comment

Between Earth and Sky, Book #2 I read Black Sun, the first book in the planned Between Earth and Sky trilogy last summer, on vacation. I inhaled that book, and it ended up being one of my best of 2021. So I got myself right on the holds list for Book #2. Of course, I neglected to go back and really refresh myself on the happenings of book 1 before diving into book 2 – which is 100% my fault. But beware, book 2 picks […]

“It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey”

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

by Leave a Comment

This was such a strange little book! I think I liked it? But maybe I didn’t fully understand it – or at least what it was trying to do? Our unnamed narrator seemingly has it all – she’s pretty, thin, Columbia grad, and wealthy enough that she doesn’t really need her job at a hot art gallery. Which last is probably for the best, because sleep is taking over her life. She can’t seem to shake the idea that if she could only sleep – […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo