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.

 

Present Tense, Past Perfect

11.22.63 by Stephen King

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It’s 2011, and Jake Epping is a high school English teacher in a sleepy Maryland town when his friend Al, who runs an implausibly cheap diner on the edge of town, asks him for a big favour: go back in time and stop the Kennedy assassination. You see, Al’s diner has a somewhat unusual feature in its storeroom: a portal back to 1958. After a few furtive explorations, Jake agrees to go down the rabbit hole, find Lee Harvey Oswald, and stop him before he […]

But the Parsnip Cake Can Go Straight to Hell

Snacking Bakes by Yossy Arefi

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If you are kind enough to ask me about myself, I will tell you I’m a baker. If you are unwise enough to have follow up questions, I will feel compelled to provide immediate clarification. Baking yeasted bread is not especially enjoyable for me because, to quote Lizzie Acker on The Great British Bake Off, “You never know what it’s thinking.”  While I made my family’s bread for years, and recently started again to redirect my baking impulses into something less calorically suspect, I don’t […]

Terrible the first time through, amazing on re-read

Blindsight by Peter Watts

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This book was so good, I read it twice. And I don’t mean, I read it years ago and wanted to read it again, like LittlePlat mentioned in their review (which is what got me to pick up this book!). No, I read it (or rather, listened to it) about a week ago, finished it feeling I hadn’t retained much, and then immediately re-read it. On the first go, I was constantly confused about what was going on and who the various characters were. I […]

Why did someone tell me I’d hate this?

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman

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I was quite worried when starting this book because Alice Oseman is primarily known for romance (especially the Heartstopper series), and I’m not a fan of romance books. Also, my brother loves this book and Oseman’s work in general, and when I told him I was going to read this, he told me that I would hate it, but I still read it because it fit the bingo category perfectly (and then forgot to review it for bingo). Radio Silence is the story of Frances […]

The Fraud really might be one

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

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I’ve heard a lot about Zadie Smith over the years. I was gifted a copy of White Teeth on my 13th birthday courtesy of an overeager salesman. I had high hopes at the time because the only other person I knew who had read it, LOVED it. She also happened to be five years older than me and had already transitioned into a Full Fledged adult. I didn’t get through the first chapter. I have always meant to go back to White Teeth. At the […]

Gotta let it burn

So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

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With Cait Corrain back in the news, figured it was really time for me to write this review already! For those less terminally online, our story didn’t start in December but that is when it become a scandal and Booktwitter found out that a debut author scheduled for a 2024 release with some decent positive buzz had been review bombing fellow 2024 YA debuts with fake Goodreads accounts while giving her own book positive reviews (which is one of the reasons it caught the attention […]



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