Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

CBR11Bingo: Award Winner (and 2 others)

Vox by Christina Dalcher

Dry by Neal Shusterman, Jarrod Shusterman

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi, Zachary Quinto (Narrator)

by 2 Comments

I’ve grouped 3 reviews here — all are “in the not so distant future, the world will be even shittier than it is now” stories. John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher won an Audie for Zachary Quinto’s narration, so that’s my “Award Winner!” Square. Vox by Christina Dalcher I don’t normally read books that have a less than 3.8 rating on Goodreads. That seems to be about my threshold for enjoying something. Vox has about a 3.6, but it was highly recommended on THIS site so I […]

“I can’t help but sense that desperation is right around the bend.”

Dry by Shusterman, Neal

by Leave a Comment

cbr11bingo – Listicle! (Dry is featured on this list of 2018 must-read teen fiction) Drought isn’t a new phenomenon to Alyssa or anyone else in California, but the ante is upped when one day the taps run dry.  Quickly termed the “tap-out” by local news, it doesn’t take long for stores to run out of bottled water and for people to start freaking out.  In this environmental disaster book, Neal Shusterman and his son Jarrod explore the possibilities of how chaos could unfold in California […]

Probably very good, but not my cup of tea

Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman

by 1 Comment

The only reason I read this is because of a coworker.  She was super into it, and wanted our department to read it as a mini book club.  So I picked it up, and I could tell it wasn’t my preferred reading genre. This is realistic fiction, and it’s a little too real for me.  And depressing. And I was reading this while listening to The Book Thief, and that was waaaaay too much depressing at once.     The basic premise is that Colorado […]

This book made me thirsty.

by Leave a Comment

I read a lot of dystopian fiction. I have read about the super flu, zombies, the earth’s rotation slowing down, nuclear wastelands, and government created vampires. This was my first foray into dystopia via climate change fiction, and parts of it were terrifying. The part that scares me the most in these dystopias are the scenes on the crowded highways. Where are you supposed to go if you can’t get there? These scenes scared me in The Stand and in World War Z — something […]

One of the few instances where the sequel surpasses the original.

by Leave a Comment

This is an extremely suspenseful, and surprisingly thoughtful science fiction novel. Honestly, I’m kind of at a loss as to what else to say! But mostly that’s because my brain feels like it’s just been squeezed through some sort of bladed juicer and now I’m expected to have coherent thoughts. I think this series is one of the few where I’m so intrigued by the ideas behind the story, and the plot developments, that I’m actually okay with the characters being somewhat empty vessels. It’s […]

Fascinating YA sci-fi dystopia, needs a little work on the characters.

by 8 Comments

Various internet peoples have been telling me to read Neal Shusterman for years now, and with Scythe he finally published a book whose premise I couldn’t resist, so here we are. If the rest of his books are as well thought out as this one was, they’re definitely getting moved up my TBR. Scythe takes place several hundred years in the future, after humanity has conquered mortality and disease*, and humans are functionally immortal. But having humanity immortal but still procreating creates an obvious problem. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo