Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Around the World Around the World

Night Prayers by Santiago Gamboa

by Leave a Comment

Very mixed feelings on Night Prayers. Ultimately, it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2025. It’s also one of the more frustrating. Gamboa writes in the style of his Latin American contemporaries such as Bolaño and Marquez. And for the most part, he does it well. This is a style I always enjoy sampling, even if it can frustrate me at times with its tangents and magic realism. I quit the book several times in the beginning but was inexorably drawn back to it and […]

A Brisk Thriller

Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

by 1 Comment

I enjoyed ElCicco’s review of Gillian McAllister’s Famous Last Words and promptly put it on my TBR list. Camille is a book editor with a husband, Luke, and a new daughter Polly. On her first day back at work after maternity leave, she is contacted by police: her husband has taken three people hostage at a nearby warehouse. Needless to say, Camille is deeply shocked. She is even more shaken when her husband kills two of the hostages and then disappears. The hostage negotiator on […]

Lost and Found

The Terror by Dan Simmons

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

by Leave a Comment

Life has an odd way of making things come together sometimes. Either that, or I simply wasn’t paying attention when I ended up accidentally reading two books about the lost Franklin expedition at the same time. Both books are fiction, which means that they take their own liberties with the truth; after all, not much is known about the exact fate of the men aboard the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.  What we do know is this: explorer Sir John Franklin, experienced but not […]

The Eighties Man

The Chalk Man by CJ Tudor

by 3 Comments

Eddie is a young boy in 1986 and he does what other 1980s teenagers did: hang around with his friends during a long, hot summer. They devise a plan to send each other secret messages using stick figures that they draw in chalk. Then, a terrible accident happens and not soon after, a body is found in the forest.  If books and TV shows are anything to go by, it’s amazing that anyone managed to escape the eighties unscathed. Then again, the point of the […]

If The Librarians met the Night at the Museum

The Night Librarian: A Graphic Novel by Christopher Lincoln

by Leave a Comment

If The Librarians television series met the movie The Night at the Museum you would have The Night Librarian: A Graphic Novel by Christopher Lincoln. Realism, fantasy and literature literally come to life on the pages of this middle grade graphic novel.  While I liked and enjoyed it, I was not “wowed.” Things are familiar (sibling issues, issues with absent parents, really expensive and rare editions of Dracula), and it is just a fun story about stories, siblings, family, communication, being appreciated. We have read […]

How the World Works

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell & Kit Chellel

The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré

by Leave a Comment

Finished two consecutive books on how the world works. Both are good and devastating in their own respective ways Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy When the cargo ship Dalit hit Baltimore’s Key Bridge last year, I felt it deeply, not just because I’m a Baltimorean but because I’ve worked with seafarers in the past. It’s a hard life: dangerous labor with little pay and almost no labor protections. Away from your family months at a […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo