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.

 

These Were Actually Really Good!

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Hawthorne Legacy by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Final Gambit by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Brothers Hawthorne by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

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I chose these as my four Binge books for CBR Sixteen Sweet Books challenge, because I read each book in a single day, then was cranky that I hadn’t made them last longer. I picked up the first book for two reasons.  The first was that I am always on the lookout for something to hand over to The Best Niece in Australia – the quest to be a worthy Aunt is ever-challenging.  The second was that I just really liked the cover.  I know […]

And Now For Something Completely Bonkers

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

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Well, this is certainly one hot mess of a novelette, and it is deliciously illustrated in sketchy (in all meanings of the word) drawings by the novelist herself, a surrealistic painter.  The heroine, nonagenarian vegetarian Marian Leatherby, starts off as quite deaf, but is then gifted with an old school hearing trumpet that lets her hear everything.  But seemingly no one notices it, even though in the drawings it looms over her head like a conning tower.  She has been placed by her children in […]

Like the frog in hot water

The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell

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I generally avoid books on climate change because they scare the shit out of me. There’s nothing like reading for hours about how we’re mindlessly ruining our only planet to bring out maximum anxiety and helplessness. I’m always left with a deep urge to do something, and feeling that it’s all out of my hands anyway. But I also don’t like to be ignorant, so when I saw The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (2023) by Jeff Goodell on NPR’s “Books we Love” […]

Yes, let the Taylor Swift-lyric title and the beautiful cover lure you in.

Don't Want You Like a Best Friend (Mischief & Matchmaking, #1) by Emma R. Alban

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[finishes book] [three and a half weeks later] I don’t know why I’m having such a mental block about writing this review, so I’m just going to go and see what happens. [two days later] This is an adult queer Regency romance featuring two young women as the protagonists, and it’s the first sapphic historical I think that I have really loved*. There still isn’t that much f/f historical romance or ones involving nb folks to begin with, but the ones I’ve read have not […]

Well, I’ve got some thinking to do…

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price, PhD

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When my therapist asked if I had read Unmasking Autism a few weeks ago, I knew my whole mentality towards a lot of things was about to change. So I put it on hold at the library…but then I couldn’t wait so I downloaded the audiobook on Libro.FM and bought a print copy the next time I was at B&N. From the start, I had a whole new way of looking at what my life had looked like for nearly four decades, and what that might […]

“No life is ever in the skinniest bit predictable.”

People Collide by Isle McElroy

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Can you imagine gender-bending body switching done well? A novel in which both bodies and minds are taken seriously, even amid the most impossible of circumstances? Isle McElroy, who also identifies as non-binary, manages to capture the necessity and insignificance of gender in this brief, genius novel. The premise – a newly wed couple in their later 20s, living in Bulgaria, wakes to find themselves inhabiting one another’s bodies. We exist primarily in the perspective of Eli, who discovers that while his thoughts are his […]



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