Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Featured Review Archive

These reviews, which were promoted in CBR social media, on our homepage, and in Pajiba Love, appear below by review publication date, not by date featured.

 

Victorian steampunk romance with ghosts!

Gaslight Hades by Grace Draven

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You can always count on Draven for some creative world building that doesn’t feel like LOTR fan fiction. Plot: Nathaniel was a rich, happy dude with a penchant for steampunk type engineering, not least because Lenore, the daughter of the inventor he worked with most was brilliant and beautiful and super into him. But he had a passion for exploring, so he got himself drafted to work on a transport ship that travels deep into space, and then promptly got himself killed by unutterable horrors […]

Life on a Cult TV Show – While Also in an Actual Cult!

Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz

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CBR16 Bingo: Rings – A lot of people get married in this book – at least four couples, including the author Lenz to the cult leader’s son. Bethany Joy Lenz is famous for playing Haley James Scott in the cult TV show One Tree Hill, but her experience of this time is even stranger than one would expect – she was in an actual cult at the time. I never watched One Tree Hill, but with a premise like that, who cares? Besides, TV show […]

Don’t Mean to Spy

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

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I’ve tried Rachel Kushner’s books before but they’re a little over my head. However, I’m on a spy kick and it just so happens that her new one is a critically acclaimed spy novel and, while knowing it would still be different from the usual pulpy thrill of typical espionage fare, I decided to try it. The cool thing about writing espionage is that we all desire to lead secret lives and espionage fiction allows us to explore that. The sad necessity of hiding human […]

Everything is 100% off if you don’t buy it.

Don't Be Trashy: A Practical Guide to Living with Less Waste and More Joy: A Minimalism Book by Tara McKenna

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Buy for your real life: Remember those high-heeled boots I bought that were perfect for life in New York City? I didn’t buy those for my real life, unfortunately. Figure out what you tend to buy for your fantasy life, and face the reality that perhaps those things aren’t for you. ― Tara McKenna, Don’t Be Trashy: A Practical Guide to Living with Less Waste and More Joy CBR16 Bingo: Cult I have anxiety. Every time I unwrap something packaged in plastic, or when I […]

Marketed as a thriller, but it really isn’t

Don't Forget the Girl by Rebecca McKanna

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The story: In the early aughts, Abby, Bree, and Chelsea were best friends and students at the University of Iowa. On Halloween night, they get in a fight, Abby runs off, and is never seen again. Her suspected killer is later arrested and convicted of another murder, but Abby’s death is never officially solved. Twelve years later, Bree and Chelsea have drifted apart but are brought back together as Abby’s suspected killer is soon to face the death penalty for his other crimes. The story […]

Found Family with Spies, Killers, and Secrets but It’s Cozy

Spy X Family Family Portrait by Aya Yajima, Tatsuya Endo

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For some reason I really needed a cozy read not long ago; I’m part way through something that sounded like it should have but is turning out to not be that. I put down book #1, and went for option 2: manga. Or to be more precise, a series of short stories based on the manga (and also now anime) Spy X Family titled Spy X Family: Family Portrait. If you know the series it helps but it’s not totally mandatory as there is a […]



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