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.

 

Mind? Blown.

The Tree by Colin Tudge

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Well, I started this book knowing very little in the way of botany, and I feel compelled to point out the process of placing plants into various families is Seriously Bonkers, to use the scientific term.  The two biggest families are, in layman’s terms, the roses and the daisies.  But the roses also include grape vines, cabbages, oak trees, and rubber trees, while the daisies have carrots, coffee, ash trees, and olive trees for relatives.  Apparently it all has to do with DNA, but wow.  […]

Lawns are dead, man

Lawns Into Meadows: Growing a Regenerative Landscape by Owen Wormser

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This short, easy to read volume is a call to arms to put away your lawn mower and embrace a less tidy meadow. Owen Wormser is a landscape designer in the US Northeast, specializing in organic designs for residential and commercial spaces. Mowed lawn space across the US works out to roughly the equivalent of the state of Washington. Lawns were once a status symbol: owning land that didn’t need to be used for food production was a flex. While lawns can be beautiful, they’re […]

I need to feel certain in who I’m kissing. I mean, a kiss isn’t just a kiss to me.

Never Been Kissed by Timothy Janovsky

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I was so excited when Never Been Kissed was selected as one of the Cannon Book Club Hot Fun in the Summertime books. I hope you, dear reader, will join our discussion on June 23&24. Timothy Janovsky has been on my list of authors I’d like to read for a while. In the large field of m/m (all male love interest) romances, he is one of a few men writing. Even rarer, he is a traditionally published author writing m/m new adult romantic comedies. To […]

I don’t want to be that guy….but Cormac McCarthy wrote a really good book.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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I sometimes think of myself as a smart man. But I’m not a smart man. I’m just interested in a lot of things, so I have a tendency to look into a lot of things. That gives me a broad but fairly shallow knowledge base upon which I can build my reality. Since I go wherever my interests direct me, I can’t always predict where I’ll be, or what I’ll experience. When I try and set a course, I find that I start to drift […]

Quotable Tomato History

Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World by William Alexander

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Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World is presented as both history and investigation, and it’s got a lot of both. It’s pretty readable for non-fiction based in science, but the biggest thing it’s got going for it is a lot of interesting facts that don’t necessarily always go together. There’s some tension in the narration and story-telling, and the factual reporting, but overall it’s a pretty decent read. No wonder I have to give it back to the library without a renewal (someone’s already put […]

Monks & Nuns & Ivy Oh My!

The Last Heir to Blackwood Library by Hester Fox

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I’ve read some real stinkers lately but luckily this gentle gothic mystery wasn’t one of them. The story begins in London, 1925, with young Ivy Radcliffe hurrying to her appointment with an unknown solicitor. Ivy lives a life of poverty and struggle in the East End. She has lost her whole family somewhat recently, her father and brother in the trenches of the Great War and her mother of illness soon after. The solicitor informs Ivy that she is now Lady Hayward, inheritor of the […]



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