Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Lineage of Madness

The Noh Mask Mystery by Akimitsu Takagi

by Leave a Comment

An aspiring mystery writer and his childhood friend must join forces to solve the mystery of a string of deaths in a prominent Japanese family that may be the result of an inherited curse. I’ve always enjoyed reading works in translation – they seem to bring you closer to the place in which they are set – but I definitely haven’t read many genre works. As such, I was intrigued by the prospect of this locked room murder mystery, written in 1949 but never before […]

My little piggy needed something new.

Pearl by Josh Malerman

by Leave a Comment

“Sing for me, Brother Jeff. Sing for Pearl.” There is something unsettling about Walter Kopple’s farm out on Murdock Road. Something that makes you drive a little faster when going past, that makes you feel a bit like you walked through cobwebs. Jeff and Aaron don’t like visiting their grandfather’s farm because of the way it feels. They know, as does everyone, something is wrong at the farm. Something is wrong with the pigs and the large male who lords over them, Pearl. Pearl with […]

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad…House

It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

by Leave a Comment

A knock at the door. A series of frantic knocks at the door. Yes, It Will Just Be Us  nearly starts with “it was a dark and stormy night”. Our narrator, Sam, is a down-and-out adjunct professor of archeology barely hanging onto her sanity. After a series of upsetting events, we find her moving back to her crumbling, ancestral mansion in on the edge of a foreboding Virginia swamp. The mansion is, for all intents and purposes, haunted. It’s haunted by the living specter of her […]

Another Alice story…

by 1 Comment

I’m not really sure where to begin with this book. It’s super weird, but kinda fun at the same time. I’m nearly positive I liked it! It was a quick read too.  There’s a while bunch of other books in the series, so I’m definitely continuing on with Alice’s tales. So I’ll just start where the book starts. There’s a murder of a girl at Oxford University, and it looks like the Cheshire Cat did it. Like this guy: From Alice in Wonderland. Except in […]

“Amory Lorch, Cersei Lannister, Chiswyck, Dunsen, Gregor Clegane, Ilyn Payne, Joffrey Baratheon, Meryn Trant, Forel Polliver, Raff the Sweetling, The Hound, The Tickler, Weese”…

by 6 Comments

They broke the mold after Dumas wrote “The Count of Monte Cristo.” There will never be a revenge plot as ambitious, as smooth, as Rube Goldbergian, as violent, as tense, or as passionate as this. This is the Ur Revenge Plot. I devoured this book. Inhaled it. And it’s partly because my brain melted a bit after the election, and then I was doggedly rebuilding my spirits with Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark” (TBR) (GET OFF MY BACK), and then it was Thanksgiving, and I […]

This is Madness!

by 2 Comments

Antoinette Cosway, the main character of this novel, is the crazy woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Rhys imagines the life of Rochester’s first wife and the events that drove her to madness, demonstrating her knowledge and understanding of Jamaican/West Indies history and culture as well as the powerful socio-economic forces that influenced post-Emancipation development there. As Francis Wyndham writes in the introduction, …Rhys knew about the mad Creole heiresses in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo