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.

 

A totally different book than I normally read

The Direction of the Wind by Mansi Shah

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I don’t remember how I found this book, but it’s totally not my style. Nobody gets murdered. I was going to say there aren’t even any missing persons or mysteries to solve, but that’s totally not true. I guess it had the undertones of “my style” of book and I didn’t even realize it. We start out with Sophie mourning the loss of her father, who just recently passed away. She’s helping her aunts clean out the house, and she finds some old letters hidden […]

Your life hasn’t even started yet and you’re already lost?

Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi

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CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #5: Books from different countries. Japan.) This one was an adventure for me. I don’t know a lot about Japanese literature or anime, but my kid is a Japanophile. He’s planning to minor in Japanese in college this (gulp) fall and would like to live there for a couple of years at some point (also, gulp). So, I thought of him when I saw this on the “new” bookshelf at the library and decided to give it a whirl. I asked him about it and […]

Failing up and into my heart

Party of One by Dave Holmes

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“What to the untrained eye looked like vegging out in front of the television was actually me silently plotting a way to crawl inside.” “Looking back, I think my family raised me right. There were probably some lessons about decency and fairness and manners in there somewhere – who can remember? – but the main thing my parents and brothers taught me by example was how to appreciate pop culture and music. I want to thank them and also explain to them that I am […]

There Isn’t an Adequate Title To Tell You How Much I Loathed this Book

The People Next Door by Keri Beevis

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First let me start by stating the title of the book…(glances at another tab), right, right…it’s The People Next Door. As I have been reading this book I’ve been exclaiming to my friends, “I really hate it!” and then they will ask what it’s called and I have given a general plethora of wrong names such as The Next Door Neighbors, Neighbors, The People Who Live Next Door and finally I just started calling it The People Vs. Larry Flint because that was the only title that I […]

530 pages and I wasn’t ready for it to be over

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Adrian’s stuff is so dense and layered, it’s hard to do a recap/overview. SO MUCH happens, and it’s all smart and dramatic and amazing! The world-building is so cool, the root-for-able characters and interesting plot are almost a bonus. Okay, enough gushing. The very very nutshell version: 40 years ago, ginormous alien ships (if you made a drinking game out of every time they’re described as ‘moon-sized,’ you’d be a puddle by the end) showed up and started making beautiful and deadly sculptures out of […]

trigger warning for hysterics

The World Record Book of Racist Stories by Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar

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What to do when you have a best selling book? Write a sequel, of course, and this time invite the whole family to join in! Amber and Lacey continue their two woman charm offensive on America, in a delightful book that will almost certainly be read by well-intentioned progressives to reassure themselves that they aren’t like racist racist. Just the normal amount of racism that’s fed to all of us through our participation in white supremacy via living in America as a product of the capitalist hamster […]



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