Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Tracy

CBR 9
CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant
CBR17 Participant
CBR17 Comments
CBR17 Levels

40-something psychologist living with a husband, toddler, and 2 cats.

Tracy's Reviews:

Storytelling to Keep Tigers at Bay

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

by Leave a Comment

cbr17bingo – Black (4th BINGO, I think) I am once again impressed at how much Nghi Vo can fit into a novella. She conveys so much about the world of the Singing Hills Cycle in so few pages. In this one sentence alone, for example, we get humor, history, and religion: “Not long after Dieu skirted the Battle of Kirshan—where General Peirong was killed by a raging bull that went on to become the king of Kirshan—she came around a bend in the road to find […]

Two Completely Unrelated Books

Death to Anyone Who Reads This by Hugh Howey and Elinor Taylor

The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen

by Leave a Comment

cbr17bingo – free (replacing Arts) Death to Anyone Who Reads This  So almost immediately after I said I wasn’t likely to read this short (100-page) sequel to The Balloon Hunter, I went ahead and read it. I’m not sure what had made me think it would be more of a horror novel than the first one. It isn’t really, although there is some more violence in this once. Similar to The Balloon Hunter, this one is a “found novel,” but this time through journal entries instead of postcards. […]

Wish You Were Here

The Balloon Hunter by Hugh Howey and Elinor Taylor

by Leave a Comment

cbr17bingo – review (from TikTok) I think this might be the most unique book I’ve ever read. It’s a short novel told exclusively through postcards (that seem to be actually hand-written). The two characters are Rita, who writes the postcards and sends them out attached to balloons, and Clayton, who finds them and writes on the backs as a sort of journal. We learn from these postcards that there was an apocalypse of some sort, and Rita’s postcards bring Clayton hope. He sets off to find […]

Oof

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

by Leave a Comment

[Check content warnings: there are a lot of them.] After Banned Books Week, a friend decided that as a way of encouraging people to read banned books year round, she’d create a banned books book club, and The Bluest Eye was the first selection. This is only my third Morrison book (loved Beloved, was not a fan of God Help the Child), and I’m glad I read it, but it is not an easy read. It is intense, distressing, and bleak. There is almost no hope to be found this book. […]

Two Political Fantasy Books

The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince by Robin Hobb

The Kingdom of Copper by S. A. Chakraborty

by Leave a Comment

cbr17bingo – Citizen (for The Kingdom of Copper, in which the shafit are second class citizens) The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince How does Robin Hobb do it? This novella is told in a straightforward, fairy tale-type manner, with relatively little dialogue, and it was still so engaging. I will admit, though, that I had some idea of what was coming. I vaguely recalled a brief mention of what happened to the Piebald Prince in The Farseer Trilogy, so part of the reason I was engrossed […]

“The AUDACITY of society to infuse ‘manhood’ into a child’s life.”

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

by Leave a Comment

I read this “memoir-manifesto” during Banned Books Week, and at one point while I was looking up something about it, I saw that a school board member had filed a complaint with the sheriff’s office after finding this book in a few school libraries. Yes – she basically called the cops on a book. And an important book, at that. It was a stark reminder of why it’s so important to read banned books, not just during one week in October, but year round. And […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo