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.

 

Family secrets and a ghost story

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

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I do love the tagline- She was trouble, so is her ghost. First book of the year (well first review), first CBR Passport book (book about another country).  This was a book that i suggested for my IRL book club (because i already owned it), so the review considers their responses as well. While I have owned “Sorcerer to the Crown” for a number of years I have never quite gotten into it and it took reading a book of short stories by Zen Cho […]

“Don’t limit your dreams, that’s what the school Careers Adviser said. Within reason.”

D: A Tale of Two Worlds by Michel Faber

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A fantasy novel about words and friendship that Neil Gaiman finds glorious? How could this go wrong? I was so excited to read this book, about what might happen when the letter D slowly starts disappearing from the world and only one young girl, Dhikilo Saxardiid Samawada Bentley, seems to notice. I know some people find it cutesy, but I happen to love stories with a warm, friendly narrator who enjoys wordplay and speaks directly to the reader. It’s why The Hobbit is my favourite […]

“every death is significant, even when every life appears not to be”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

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I am exhausted: extremely jet-lagged and just submitted materials for my first major deadline of 2023. So what better to do than to review the last book I read in 2022 (finished at approximately 9:30 PM on New Year’s Eve, yes I know how to party), the Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida? 2022 was actually my best year when it comes to attacking the Booker longlist; I read three of the nominees, and all of them were really excellent novels, in extremely divergent ways. […]

The Queer Family Stone

Kiss Her Once For Me by Alison Cochrun

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This is a bit of a delayed Christmas romcom review, both due to the large hold list for it through the Twin Cities-area Libby library and because I utterly fell down on actually reviewing books for CBR 14. Ellie Oliver is a failed animation artist turned webcomic writer and barista. She’s stuck in life and hung up on a one-day snowstorm fling she had over Christmas the year before so when Andrew Kim-Prescott, the landlord of the coffee shop she works at, asks him to […]

“If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.” Luke Skywalker

Star Wars: Exploring Tatooine - An Illustrated Guide by Riley Silverman

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When the first Star Wars movie came out in May 1977, I was 8 years old. I don’t know why I went to see it. I was horrifying my parents with my love of Charlie’s Angels (I remember nothing about the plots, only the hair and the costumes). I was entirely earthbound. But somehow I saw the movie and fell in love. My friends and I went from playing Charlie’s Angels to playing Charlie’s Angels in Star Wars (still horrifying my parents with that) because […]

“stand back astonished / stand back and observe”

Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul by Judith Valente, Charles Reynard

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This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it – from Lisel Mueller’s “Alive Together” April is National Poetry Month, so I wanted to squeeze in this review this week. However, I didn’t squeeze in this book. No, I read it over months (years?), coming back and forth to certain poems, picking them up and putting them down to see how they look on different days, in different light. What I […]



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