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.

 

What’s worse than ghosts? Puppets.

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

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So I wasn’t a fan of Horrorstor and had no interest in reading more of Hendrix’s books, but I couldn’t help grabbing How to Sell a Haunted House. I’m not even sure why. Honestly, I think it was just the cover. I mean, maybe we just got off on the wrong foot with Horrorstor and needed a second date to figure out if the chemistry really worked or not. This may come as a surprise, but this story is about a haunted house. But even worse, […]

Fairy Tales Can Be Deadly

The Last Tale of The Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi

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This book is the very definition of the word Gothic. It belongs on the shelves next to Jane Eyre and Rebecca.  As in Rebecca, the main character in the novel isn’t given a name. He is just referred to as The Bridegroom. The Bridegroom is a curator of myths, legends, and fairy tales. While tracking down a rare book, he encounters Indigo Maxwell-Castenada, an heiress to a massive fortune, and a woman obsessed with fairy tales. They get married rather quickly, and she makes him […]

Twisty, Serial (the podcast)-style thriller

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

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Here is my first book of 2023 released in 2023 – and yet, with much of the action taking place in 2018, and 1995, it feels like an artifact of a different time altogether. At times, this reads like a Serial origin story. In 2018, Bodie Kane is invited back to Granby, a boarding school in New Hampshire that she attended in the early 1990s. Her graduating class was infamous for the deaths of three students – one of those students being her roommate, Thalia Keith. […]

A Celebration of Books and Readers

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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I am a sucker for  Louise Erdrich, and this book did not disappoint. This is a book lover’s story: the romance of words, sentences, the independent bookstore, discussions about books, book recommendations, all wrapped up in a darn good story. Tookie, the narrator begins: “While in prison, I received a dictionary. . . I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in the afterlife. So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e‘s, with its […]

In defense of Pippin, the actual best hobbit

The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

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I did not care for the Lord of the Rings when I was younger. It took my then-boyfriend three attempts at making me watch through the series before I could stay awake past Boromir dying. It just that Boromir takes too damn long to die. But he persisted and fed me tasty things to keep me awake and I discovered LOTR (or the LORT we call it at home) meme groups online and suddenly I was in baby. I mean, I needed to understand the underlying […]

Review #2: 1203 Pages of Awesome

The Bonehunters by Steven Erikson

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The sixth book in an epic fantasy ten book series, reading this was a no-brainer for me. I have already read the first five books, and mostly loved them, so how could I not continue? The Bonehunters publisher’s summary is as follows (spoilers hidden): “The Seven Cities Rebellion has been crushed. Sha’ik is dead. One last rebel force remains, holed up in the city of Y’Ghatan and under the fanatical command of Leoman of the Flails. The prospect of laying siege to this ancient fortress […]



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