Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Familiar and Strange

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry

Messenger by Lois Lowry

Son by Lois Lowry

by Leave a Comment

I was 11 when The Giver was published, and I remember my 7th grade English teacher, the next year, reading it aloud to my class. It was my first exposure to dystopian fiction and I ate it up. Everyone in my class had their own copy so we could follow along, and within a few years my copy was completely dog-eared and tattered, as I read and reread. At some point, having moved on to more sophisticated dystopias as I got older, it ended up […]

No Sparkly Vampires or Helpless Females here.

by Leave a Comment

I wasn’t going to read this book.  I have already declared a moratorium on post-apocalyptic trilogies starring plucky youngsters sprinkled in fairy dust that are the saviors of the entire world.  Especially since this is one of those series that is self-published on Amazon and included in the free Kindle library. But the other day I was looking for something fast paced and interesting and this one was free so I gave it a shot. It’s fairly obvious that the heroine, Penryn is modeled after […]

When Books Make You Throw Them

by 2 Comments

Late last year I read the first book in Aveyard’s series about a young girl with extraordinary abilities. Because this is the sequel, there will be spoilers for the first book. If you plan on picking up this series (and I recommend doing that), then I would skip this review and go right to reading! Mare has such a fun story, one that I think greatly improved with this second book. I thought this was only a two-book series, and when I got to the end of […]

Shut up, Juliette

by 4 Comments

Shatter Me is a silly, overblown book that reads like the literary journal the kids in your 1990’s middle school published out of the public library and distributed in front of a local Hot Topic. I’m not going into a lot of plot detail here, because if you’ve read any dystopian YA novel in the past five years, you’ve read this one. I’m also going to be mildly spoiling the book, so, you know, beware. Juliette has been locked up in a solitary psych ward […]

Remains very solid if not stellar.

by 2 Comments

For some reason I thought Kresley Cole’s Arcana Chronicles would be a trilogy. I don’t know why I thought that, considering her flagship PNR series stands at 15 books and counting. Dead of Winter is the third book in the series, and there is no sign that this thing is ending any time soon. But that’s okay — I’m actually enjoying the series, even if I’ve lost my taste for the type of angsty, controlling-posturing-as-romantic, aggressive young men that are the archetypes for both of […]

A Very Dystopian Bachelor-meets-The Civil War

by 3 Comments

A little free advice from me to you: never work a job with crazy hours. You’ll forever mess up your sleep cycles and end up battling insomnia for years. On the upside, that allows you to blow through three books over the course of two very bad nights at your parents house! The Selection is a series set sometime after World War 4 in a nation that’s the combination of Canada, the United States, and Latin America. They banded together to fight off China and […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo