Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Don’t pass on these Passover books

An Invitation to Passover by Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, Rabbi Deborah Bodin Cohen and Mariia Kolker

Why On This Night? : A Passover Haggadah for Family Celebration by Rahel Musleah and Louise August

by Leave a Comment

Both of the Passover books in this review are from February 2024, however, I still had online reader copies of both. The first, An Invitation to Passover by Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, Rabbi Deborah Bodin Cohen and illustrated by Mariia Kolker was read in full, while the second, Why On This Night? : A Passover Haggadah for Family Celebration by Rahel Musleah, and Louise August was skimmed. With that said, both seem to be really good Passover stories. Olitzky’s story is a younger introduction to the […]

I was going to send all the spider pictures to my sister, but she’d unalive me….

The Spider Lady: Nan Songer and Her Arachnid World War II Army by Penny Parker Klostermann

by Leave a Comment

Disclaimer: Realistic spiders are drawn in the book The Spider Lady: Nan Songer and Her Arachnid World War II Army by Penny Parker Klostermann and  Anne Lambelet. It is due early May 2025, and was read via an online reader copy. OMG! Now, if you do not like spiders, you probably should not read this book. However, I wish you would. Yes, there are spiders (a lot of spiders) but the art of Lambelet makes them so darn cute!  I mean, I’d cuddle with them…. […]

“The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

by Leave a Comment

In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, more than 7000 Athenian prisoners of war are left to rot in Syracuse’s quarries – except a select few whom unemployed Syracusan potters Lampo and Gelon decide will be perfect to mount a pair of plays by the great tragic playwright Euripides. You might have to reread that premise. It’s a pretty whacky one, though some mild trawling of Wikipedia later revealed to me that allegedly some Athenian prisoners in Sicily did buy their freedom by reciting Euripides […]

“You try fighting crime as a nineteen-year-old Victorian housemaid.”

A Rip Through Time (A Rip Through Time #1) by Kelley Armstrong

by 4 Comments

To be clear this (the first in a series) is a time travel, historical fiction with a light dusting of maybe implied possible romance.  It should not be confused with the author’s A Stitch In Time series which are time travel, historical fiction, and romance novels.   Am I putting that disclaimer here because I was confused about the similarity in the series name?  Yes.  Yes, I am. In this series, we start in Edinburgh on May 20, 2019.  Vancouver police detective Mallory Atkinson is […]

The Sound of [Not] Silence

The Silentary by Antonio Di Benedetto

by 2 Comments

Written in 1964 by Argentinian writer Di Benedetto, The Silentary, or the “maker of silence”, is set in a nameless Latin American city in the early 1950s.  The nameless narrator is a young man who aspires to be a novelist, and silence is the one thing he cannot control at all.  For no matter where he goes, noise is always there.  He shares an apartment with his mother, and has a friend from work (a nameless bureaucratic agency), and a girlfriend, Nina, who soon moves […]

First of three interconnected prequel stories to Vox Machina,

The Legend of Vox Machina: The Whitestone Chronicles Volume 1 Ripley by Critical Role, Tyler Walpole and Marieke Nijkamp

by 2 Comments

The Legend of Vox Machina: The Whitestone Chronicles Volume 1 Ripley by Critical Role, Tyler Walpole and  Marieke Nijkamp is not OMG BEST BOOK EVER but it is a nice read. You know the story if you’ve followed Vox Machina in any of its forms, but also because it is a fairly straightforward Villain who does not see herself as Villain (and later a couple forms of revenge) story. The artwork is familiar. You know the scenes and setting. Few real surprises, but it is […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo