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:

Three’s Company. Four’s Trouble. It’s All…Messy.

Wahala by Nikki May

by Leave a Comment

Wahala, Nikki May’s debut novel, has been getting a ton of buzz in library-land, so I was super excited to get my hands on a copy. Wahala follows three Anglo-Nigerian friends living in London, Ronke, Simi, and Boo. When Simi introduces Isobel, a friend from her childhood in Nigeria, to the group, cracks start to form. What follows is a roller-coaser train wreck that somehow manages to reach epic levels of preposterousness before anyone realizes where the chaos started from. But, before we get to […]

Who are the monsters here?

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy

by 2 Comments

Inti Flynn is a woman with A Past. She arrives in the Scottish highlands leading a “rewilding project”: her team is going to reintroduce wolves to Scotland, where they were hunted to extinction hundreds of years before. Not only is Inti a prickly character who understands wolves better than people, she also suffers from a neurological condition called Mirror Touch Synesthesia, which means that she feels the sensations of everything she sees. We also understand very early on that Inti has been profoundly damaged by […]

“No matter what any woman said, culture could not be escaped. Even if it meant tragedy. Even if it meant death.”

A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum

by Leave a Comment

Rum’s heartbreaking debut is a generational story about three Palestinian-American women struggling to find their place within their family, balancing their culture with the new pressures and freedom of America. We have three main POV charactersIsra is born and raised in Palestine, and after her arranged marriage at 17, moves to live with her husband’s family to Brooklyn. Isra dreams of finding a love like the one she’s read about in books. Deya is Isra’s oldest daughter, who dreams of going to college instead of […]

If you crossed Crazy Rich Asians with Weekend at Bernies…

Dial A For Aunties by Jessie Q. Sutanto

by 1 Comment

Meddelin Chan is a twentysomething Indo-Chinese woman living in LA with her mother and being slowly henpecked to death by her loving but overbearing family. She works in the family wedding business with her mother and three aunts (Big Aunt, Second Aunt, Fourth Aunt), and they have their biggest wedding yet coming up. When her mother announces that she’s set Meddy up on a blind date, Meddy decides to just go with it, and see what happens. What happens…is that Meddy accidentally kills her date. […]

Running away to the woods

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

by Leave a Comment

Maggie St. James is the author of five children’s books, a series called Eloise and the Fox. Her books are dark, creepy, and some think they are inappropriate for children. After a small boy dies after hiking into the Alaskan wilderness with a copy of her book, St. James walks into the wilderness and disappears. Several years later, Maggie’s parents hire Travis Wren to find their daughter. Travis is a mess, barely keeping it together, but he has a talent for finding people. His secret […]

Sometimes, food is love

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

by Leave a Comment

I am an absolute sucker for a memoir read by the author, and particularly fond of celebrity memoirs. I’ve been aware of the buzz around this book for a while, but wasn’t familiar with Japanese Breakfast (the author’s band), and didn’t really have intentions of picking it up for myself. …And then I found myself scrolling through Libby looking for an “available now” audiobook and decided to give it a try. Crying in H Mart is, at its heart, a book about the author’s relationship […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo