Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The TV Series is Better

The Umbrella Academy Vol.1: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy Vol.2: Dallas by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

The Umbrella Academy Vol.3: Hotel Oblivion by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

by Leave a Comment

Cbr16bingo Earth Day, bingo I really enjoyed The Umbrella Academy series on Netflix and just did a binge of the first three seasons before watching the fourth and final season. Overall, I thought it was excellent. The resolution to the series was great and made sense of a lot of stuff that had been unresolved. I knew it was based on a graphic novel series and decided to pick it up and see how the the TV series compares to the original, and surprisingly for […]

Present Tense, Past Perfect

11.22.63 by Stephen King

by Leave a Comment

It’s 2011, and Jake Epping is a high school English teacher in a sleepy Maryland town when his friend Al, who runs an implausibly cheap diner on the edge of town, asks him for a big favour: go back in time and stop the Kennedy assassination. You see, Al’s diner has a somewhat unusual feature in its storeroom: a portal back to 1958. After a few furtive explorations, Jake agrees to go down the rabbit hole, find Lee Harvey Oswald, and stop him before he […]

Red or Dead

The Pledge by Kathleen Kent

by Leave a Comment

This one followed the same pattern as the Hunger Games trilogy: interesting first book followed by an excellent second and a concluding one that basically made me say “Eh, ok, I guess that’s an ending.” Part of why I loved (indeed loved) The Burn, the second book in the Betty Rhyzyk trilogy, is because I thought Kathleen Kent did an excellent job covering Betty’s PTSD from the end of the events of the first book. Too often, series writers put their characters through hell only to have them […]

Big Red

The Burn by Kathleen Kent

by Leave a Comment

The Dime, Kathleen Kent’s first Betty Rhyzyk novel, went from being an interesting if conventional police procedural mystery to something else. If you appreciate the out of nowhere, somewhat bananas turn (as I did), you’d probably be moving on to the second book to see how she dealt with it. If not, you’d likely skip it. When I read the reviews for it, opinions were mixed and I get it. The twist was perhaps imperfectly handled and may have felt gimmicky. But I thought it made […]

The Pokes, The City

The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America by Joe Nick Patoski

by Leave a Comment

Back in February 2020 (aka The Before Times), I visited my in-laws who had moved to the Dallas metro area the previous summer. I had never been to Texas, much less Dallas, so I was excited to see the city. It was…something. Not good or bad, just different. The vibes there were really strange. The weather was weird (somehow hot and cold simultaneously). It felt like someone used hundred dollar bills to paper over cardboard boxes and sterile, charmless buildings. But it still had a […]

Mess In Texas

The Dime by Kathleen Kent

by Leave a Comment

The Dime is an interesting book. It purports to be one thing, and it is for most of the story’s first 2/3rds. And then it becomes something else in the final 1/3rd. How you feel about the book will likely hinge on how you feel about that final 1/3rd. Let’s start with those first 2/3rds: It was okay. Betty, the protagonist, is a narcotics officer with the Dallas Police Department, and a New York transplant. Kent doesn’t waste a lot of time comparing the two different […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo