Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Travis_J_Smith

CBR 6
CBR 7
CBR 9
CBR14 Participant
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant

(Learn more about this Cannonballer: ravis_J_Smith's Quick Questions interview.)

Travis_J_Smith's Reviews:

As dark as its title suggests

Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine

by Leave a Comment

Killing and Dying is a peculiar little story collection. Every story, every character, has some level of seediness to it. He appears to trade only in imperfect characters, leaving all their stories pretty open-ended. Our first story, for example, focuses on a guy wanting to sell people on what really does bear a lot of resemblance to a Chia pet (like a character mentions), only more artsy, a combination sculpture/plant that would need constant, paid upkeep from him (and which he asks $500 for upfront). […]

I guess you could say it left me… Cold?

Cold by Mariko Tamaki

by Leave a Comment

I’m not usually one to read books week-of-release. Aside from my favorite author, Rainbow Rowell, no author inspires enough confidence in me to not wait it out to see what reviews are like. And I’m not usually one to get in on the ground floor with an author either. I’m just not in-the-know enough for that. This particular exception, Cold by Mariko Tamaki, came on a whim after seeing it listed as one of The Strand’s Book-of-the-Month options. I randomly remembered how awesome that book […]

The Keeper of Lost Things kinda loses its way…

The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

by Leave a Comment

During a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I decided I wanted, for fun, for my fiancee to pick a book for me at random based solely upon the cover. Loving flowers, like she does, she naturally picked this one: The Keeper of Lost Things. Initially, in the more grounded beginning, I was liking this book. A man who lost his wife, as well as something special she’d given him to hold onto, decides to devote his life to picking up any and every lost […]

Kaur in her infancy is still Kaur well worth a read

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

by Leave a Comment

Maybe I shouldn’t have read Kaur’s first last. It’s not like it was an intentional choice, though. We already had her second book, having bought it forever ago, and her third book was the only other one I saw popping up at the Targets we frequent. For Milk and Honey, I had to travel 45 minutes to pick it up from a different Target that actually had it, after visiting another Target in that same city that was supposed to have it and didn’t. Could […]

Damnit, Disney.

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

by 1 Comment

Now I have more reason to be pissed about the animated adaptation of Nimona being cancelled by Disney. Them buying Blue Sky Studios and immediately burying one of their most promising projects was enough of a reason for me to be angry, but I hadn’t even read the graphic novel at the time of seeing that news, so I didn’t know if I was right to be so upset. People seemed to love Nimona, though, it sounded like a promising property for an animated movie, […]

I don’t think they’ve come back to reality quite yet…

My Alcoholic Escape from Reality by Nagata Kabi

by Leave a Comment

I saw My Alcoholic Escape from Reality on a list of the best graphic novels of 2021, and the novelty of it caught my attention. An autobiographical manga artist is hospitalized for pancreatitis thanks to her alcoholism, then decides to make an autobiographical manga about this experience as well. I admittedly wasn’t familiar with her other work, but I do have a fondness for seeing writers examine and expel their own demons through the process of writing about them. Sometimes it can feel disingenuous, like […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo