Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“He flopped sideways, mute testament to the greatest fighting technique of all: a friend behind your enemy.”

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

by 7 Comments

The Devils is my first Abercrombie book. I’ve had Half a King on my TBR for over a decade, but it hadn’t made its way onto an annual list yet. But as is often the case over the past many years narfna reviewed something ecstatically which had me checking to see if it fit a reading challenge (I’m counting this as weird horror for Read Harder and Black for CBR Bingo) and then it made its way to this year’s list.  My brain is tired having finished the nearly 550 pages of this book. But the good kind of tired. The “I just […]

Southern Fried Vampires

Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan

by Leave a Comment

This is the story of a family of women (the Evans) in Southeast Texas whose family business is running the only funeral parlour in town.  Well, that is their main business, but their side hustle is killing the restless dead (vampires) who end up in their funeral home.  The Evans are standing between their town and the Strigoi, who occasionally show up.  But the latest round of undead really puts the family to the test, and unearths some family secrets rising up from the grave. […]

“There’s some cursing. A lot. It’s kind of impressive.”

Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Revis

by 1 Comment

To begin at the end, when I finished this novella, I immediately put in requests at the library for the second and third books in the Chaotic Orbits series because I enjoyed it that much and was very interested to see where the story would go next.   If I were to start at the beginning, I would tell you that following my enjoyment of Olivia Waite’s Murder by Memory I went on the hunt for books with a similar space mystery vibe because I […]

“You try fighting crime as a nineteen-year-old Victorian housemaid.”

A Rip Through Time (A Rip Through Time #1) by Kelley Armstrong

by 4 Comments

To be clear this (the first in a series) is a time travel, historical fiction with a light dusting of maybe implied possible romance.  It should not be confused with the author’s A Stitch In Time series which are time travel, historical fiction, and romance novels.   Am I putting that disclaimer here because I was confused about the similarity in the series name?  Yes.  Yes, I am. In this series, we start in Edinburgh on May 20, 2019.  Vancouver police detective Mallory Atkinson is […]

“The fifth glass is unarguably clean. Especially because Haf has been pretending to scrub at a stain that isn’t there, like a horny Lady Macbeth wanting to prolong the moment.”

Make You Mine This Christmas by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

by 3 Comments

I love the fake dating trope, so I was pleased as punch that November’s Illumicrate Afterlight book was Make You Mine This Christmas, even more so when forced proximity and all the bisexual chaos enter the equation. The story focuses on Haf who has been having a terrible year and lets her roommate convince her to join them at crashing a Christmas party they may or may not have been invited to. It’s at that party that Haf meets Christopher and following feeling badly for […]

“She was stuck sitting in a wingback chair, her phone as dead as a brick in her hand, and listening to Orchid pepper the townie with questions about how bad the storm had gotten.”

In the Hall with the Knife by Diana Peterfreund

by Leave a Comment

This book wound up on my to read thanks to a Read Harder Challenge from 2020 – read a mystery where the victim is not a woman – and the fact that I had loved the previous books I had read by Diana Peterfreund, For Darkness Shows the Stars and Across a Star-Swept Sea (as well as their accompanying prequel short stories Among the Nameless Stars and The First Star to Fall). It ended up in my hands thanks to my book exchange gifter, NTE. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo