Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Twitter Win Fizzles

This is How You Lost the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

by 5 Comments

Twitter was kind of saved from doom recently by a guy loudly and proudly promoting his favorite new book, and encouraging others to do the same. I approve of this behavior. I was with Bigolas Dickolas (a Monty Python reference, I hope) in his enthusiasm for about the first half of This is How You Lose the Time War, but then it lost me. The problem for me is that there is not enough world and character building to hold interest and keep the story […]

Flamingos of Long Island Run Wild? Hmmm.

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

by Leave a Comment

Alright, this was some seriously creepy stuff, and I’m always in for a catastrophe that isn’t quite clearly explained.  Like you are only getting bits and pieces and nobody is ever going to actually lay it out for you.  Draw your own conclusions.  But that being said, I did have one caveat regarding it all.  But more about that later. Amanda and Clay, along with their two adolescent children, are renting a vacation home for a few weeks in a thickly wooded area of Long […]

Hitchhiking ghosts and killer roads

Sparrow Hill Road (Ghost Roads, #1) by Seaman McGuire

by Leave a Comment

When I started Sparrow Hill Road (Ghost Roads, #1) the text came off as nonfiction sounding. My thought was, “Oh great. This whack-a-doo so-called “expert” is going to tell me all about a ghost named Rose Marshall and how she is real (and how ghosts are real) and all about her hauntings, and how hauntings happen, and probably throw in a conspiracy theory or two.” Well, my apologizes, Seaman McGuire. You are not a whack-a-doo. But you are one messed up person! (And in a […]

What Is Reality?

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

by 2 Comments

This was so good! It’s set in the past and the future and jumps around in time. It follows seemingly disparate threads and characters who are tied together by their experiencing an odd event in which there is a flash of darkness and the sound of violin music. A character named Gaspery shows up and talks to each of the people who have experienced this event. There is time travel and conversations about the simulation hypothesis. There are meta elements, like a character who wrote […]

Back from whence you came

The London Seance Society by Sarah Penner

by Leave a Comment

This was an airport bookstore grab on my birthday, one of those deals where if you bring it back within six months, you can get 50% of the cover price back. The London Séance Society will indeed be going back. It’s not a bad read or story, just not amazing enough to take up some of my limited shelf space. The alternating back and forth between two perspectives and narrators actually does some pretty cool stuff with unreliability; both narrators are but for very different […]

When the map matters more than the people there will be murder

The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

by Leave a Comment

I really like the premise and general scenario of The Cartographers; you’ve got a good dose of real historical and practical map-making details along with a dose of “magical realism”. I also didn’t realize that this author was relevant to AAIPI month which May is. The general premise is that former whiz kid map scholar Nell Young who was dismissed from the famed NYPL (New York Public Library) in disgrace by her own father must now solve the mystery of her father’s murder which turns […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo