Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Is a cookbook that’s more about decoration still a cookbook?

Let's Bake! A Pusheen Cookbook by Claire Belton and Susanne Ng

by 7 Comments

Bingo Review 18 How To Cookbook review ahead, but really more of a how to decorate book. Full disclosure: I have not actually attempted anything in Let’s Bake! A Pusheen Cookbook. There is a big reason for that which I will get to shortly. First, for those unfamiliar, Pusheen is a cartoon character popular on the internet, but now perhaps best known for cutesey merchandise, like socks, mystery boxes, and calendars, widely available all over. Pusheen herself is a grey tabby cat, and by now […]

If Start Trek Got Blah and Some Part of it Knew That

Red Shirts by John Scalzi

by Leave a Comment

Bingo Review 17: Red Red Shirts (‘red’ is in the title, and occasionally referenced in-text) is basically Star Trek gone meta, really meta. I would divide the story into two parts: the part where certain members of the crew of the Intrepid start to notice some strange patterns surrounding the away missions: certain crew members always are fine (relatively) while certain others are nearly guaranteed to end up dead. But why is that? Ensign Dahl is the driving force behind trying to solve this strange […]

The Role of Money in Fairy Tales, but with a sort of Feminist twist

Kakuriyo, vols. 1-2 by Waco Ioca, Midori Yuma, Laruha

by Leave a Comment

Bingo Review 16: Money! Basically, this is a fairy tale about an impossible debt, and how to pay it without having to get married to some random rich or important guy. Here’s the set up: Aoi Tsubaki is a Japanese college student who has recently lost the grandfather who raised her. The key thing they shared was an ability to see and interact with the spirit world. One day, Aoi stops to help a hungry ayakashi (catch-all term for folkloric monster-creature) and he drags her […]

A satisfying heroine; not Sherlock Holmes

A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas

by 2 Comments

CBR12 BINGO: Red A Study in Scarlet Women has been on my radar since last year’s “Classics and Retellings” book club, when a number of Cannonballers reviewed it as an adaptation/retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous work. I was excited that CBR12 BINGO gave me an excuse to pick it up from my library. My enthusiasm arc for this novel can be visualized as a bell curve: I went from “hmm, ok but. . .,” to “wow, this is great!” back down to “mildly positive” […]

A Unique Read, Above All Else.

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

by 6 Comments

If there is one thing that I can say about Charlie Jane Anders, is that she can commit to keeping things weird. Like, deeply, deeply, weird. She’s also not at all afraid to make ambitious leaps with her writing. Her first novel, All the Birds in the Sky was a broad, experimental urban science-fantasy mash-up, which ended up charming a lot of people. And while I could recognise the flashes of brilliance in the book, the whole thing didn’t come together in a way I […]

These books are my Fillory and Further

The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman

by Leave a Comment

Quentin is ousted from Fillory and finds himself working for money in magic’s seedy underbelly. Thus begins the conclusion of The Magicians trilogy at the start of The Magician’s Land. What starts out as a job involving some not-so-petty theft quickly turns in to another quest to save Fillory. The book itself feels very much like a quest as the trilogy so far as described quests: kind of meandering at the beginning without a lot of direction until every snaps plainly into focus and all of […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo