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.

 

An Immersive World

The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope

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I love a good immersive world in fantasy and speculative fiction, where you feel like you could be in the setting. The Monsters We Defy takes place in Washington, DC in 1925, and Clara Johnson, the main character, can communicate with spirits. I listened to the audio book of this, and Shayna Small does an exceptional job with the voices and the setting and making you invested in the story. I am not surprised to see this won the Audie award for best audio book […]

Multiple dimensions of disappointment

The Dark Forest by Ciuxin Liu

by 5 Comments

** some thematic spoilers ** I loved The Three Body Problem and had high hopes for the sequel.  But I found this book so hard to get through.  It’s dense.  The first half or so is so slow.  I persevered, because I also found the first book hard to get into and all that critical acclaim had to have some justification.  But as the pace started to pick up, more dimensions of disappointment unfolded. Even before the nihilistic Battle of Darkness took place and the […]

What changes in a society when the climate changes?

Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom

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In this book, Philipp Blom examines the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling between the 16th and the 19th century, that primarily affected the North Atlantic region, and the societal changes it prompted. His focus lies mostly on the late 16th century and the 17th century in Europe as this was the period in which the effects were felt most severely, and the sources regarding the situation and changes are more plentiful for Europe than for other regions. The main part of the book […]

“Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing?”

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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The book: Bill Furlong owns a company that delivers coal to the residents of a small town in Ireland in the 1980s. Furlong (as he’s mostly referred to in the book) is married, has 5 daughters, and had an unusual upbringing (an unmarried mother, he was raised by her and her employer and doesn’t know his father–not an easy childhood in mid-century Ireland). One day, when he’s delivering coal to the local convent, Bill finds something that disturbs him and forces him to make a […]

The crowning exception to “The book is always better than the movie.”

Jaws by Peter Benchley

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While I’m sure there are those who disagree, Jaws is the crowning exception to the rule “The book is always better than the movie.” In adapting the book to the script the story was transformed, made stronger and streamlined, and fixed all of the problems of the novel. To be transparent, Jaws is my all-time favorite movie. Ok, maybe the top five but that’s splitting hairs and ranking is largely dependent on which of my favorite movies I have most recently seen. I love every […]

A True Crime Memoir

The Babysitter by Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan

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Decided to start 2023 off with a bang after listening to an interview of the co-authors on the podcast Tenfold More Wicked. As Liza recounted her childhood story to host Kate Winkler Dawson, my interest was immediately piqued and I borrowed the e-book from the library. Needless to say I burned through this book after 2 nights. The format of the novel is unlike any I have read before, where the author alternates chapter between her childhood growing up in Cape Cod and the story of […]



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