Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I enjoyed this so much more than I thought I would

Cold Storage by David Koepp

by 3 Comments

“From the screenwriter of Jurassic Park!” screams the cover.  Which Jurassic Park?  Original Flavour or New Generation?  No idea.  This is another Mum recommendation, but much more successful than the previous effort.  We actually picked her up a Bargain Box of Books for Christmas 2021, $100 for 30ish crime fiction novels that she’s spend the year reading. I enjoyed it much, much more than expected.  There were a few moments that actually had me laughing out loud. So, and bear with me here because it’s […]

A House With Good Bones

A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

by 2 Comments

Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not effect my rating or review.  The main thing I will say is that this novella reads really similar to T. Kingfisher’s “The Twisted Ones.” At one point I wondered if I had accidentally started re-reading it. But even though it hits some of the same elements (terrible grandmother) it has some different ones (main character is a bug doctor). The novella jumps around a lot I thought. Things didn’t really gel for me […]

Getting in the last of my 2022 Reviews!

Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardous

The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

by Leave a Comment

Girls Made of Snow and Glass (3 stars)-Not bad, but I started to get bored halfway through the book. Liked both characters points of views (Mina and Lynet), but I started wanting the story to go faster. I liked the idea of these two characters really wanting the other to be more (Lynet wanting Mina to be her mother and Mina wanting to be Lynet’s mother) and them being pulled apart by terrible men. But, after you keep reading, the book falls apart. I think […]

This YA horror was more disturbing to me than some adult horror books I’ve read.

The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass

by Leave a Comment

It’s nearly always a good thing when one of your only complaints about a book is “I wanted more”. I say nearly, because I have read some stinkers where the main thing wrong was that the author didn’t actually do the work of fleshing out the world and the characters. Here, that’s not the problem. It’s pretty clear from reading this that the author did his work. It’s a concise YA horror story about a young man who can see ghosts (among other abilities), and […]

“Shanna was the first to go. And by ‘go’ I mean die. And by ‘die’ I mean get killed.”

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

by Leave a Comment

I suppose it was inevitable that I wouldn’t perfectly gel with every single thing SGJ has written. This was good, but not really my thing. At first, I was really into it because I love a chatty, informal narrator (when done well). And in the style regard, I can’t fault this book at all. It’s solid. But the story itself just didn’t really work for me. The novella opens with our main character, Sawyer, telling us about the time a prank went very wrong for […]

“The first thing I hate is called a Russian doll. It holds a smaller version of itself inside it, and another inside that and so on. How awful. They are prisoners. I imagine them all screaming in the dark, unable to move or speak. The doll’s face is broad and blankly smiling. It looks so happy to be holding its children captive.”

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

by 3 Comments

So after a night where this book sat in my subconscious probably doing things to me, I’m upping my rating to five stars. I can’t stop thinking about it, and the ending did what I want more horror endings to to do for me. There are quite a few people who experience a sort of literary catharsis with the presence of violence and gore, but I am not one of those people (and maybe they don’t even care about catharsis! who knows!). This book has […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo