Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Comfy Tropes Galore, But Not Particularly Trope-y

First Comes Baby... by Christine Rimmer

by Leave a Comment

Josie has given up on finding a partner after being unlucky in love and chooses to have a baby on her own. But when she gives birth with the help of her neighbor Miles, a connection is formed between the two, and they decide to get married to form a comfortable family unit. But of course, the marriage-of-convenience is not as convenient as it seems… I picked up this book for an obvious reason: There is a smiling baby flying through the air on the […]

Fourteen Hundred Years of History; Still Uncovering the Women whose Achievements were Hidden.

The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry that Forged the Medieval World by Shelley Puhak

by Leave a Comment

I work in Public History, but any good public historian (or historian of any stripe) will tell you that it is nearly impossible to know all eras and areas well. There are inevitable blind spots – you must choose where to apply your limited time. When this year’s Read Harder challenge asked us to read a history about a period you know little about, I was stoked, an excuse to go back further than I normally do and read about some women doing the leading. […]

“Stranger things have happened,” I say. “Most of them in the last month.”

The Wedding Crasher by Mia Sosa

by 6 Comments

I really enjoyed this contemporary fake dating romance set in and around Washington DC. The Wedding Crasher is Mia Sosa’s follow up to The Worst Best Man. Solange Pereira agrees to help her cousin at a wedding and inadvertently becomes the main attraction when she overhears the bride profess her love to a man who is not the groom. Dean isn’t heartbroken about being left at the alter. It’s disappointing though. He had hoped to get life partner ticked off his to-do list, but he wasn’t in […]

Intersectional environmentalism argues that the same systems of oppression that oppress people also oppress and degrade the planet.

The Intersectional Environmentalist by Leah Thomas

by Leave a Comment

There is a person in my life with whom I share many values, but he consistently dismisses race and gender as things about which he ought to be concerned.  Because he doesn’t consider himself to hold racist beliefs, he doesn’t understand why we’ve all been talking about race when we really ought to be focused on climate change. Since I am a known radical, he has largely dismissed my insistence that climate change can’t be solved without also dismantling patriarchy and white supremacy. While my […]

Dishes don’t think. Dishes don’t judge. Care tasks are morally neutral

How to Keep House While Drowning: a gentle approach to cleaning and organizing by KC Davis

by 8 Comments

I read KC Davis’ self published How to Keep House While Drowning in January 2021 and since then I have recommended it to many many people and bought it for a few. I was delighted to see that Davis’ book is being republished by a Simon & Schuster imprint, Simon Element. I hope it gets in the hands of more people. I consider this an essential book. I value this book on several levels. One: my ability to stay on top of multiple care tasks […]

Go Ask Alice… If You Can Find Her!

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson

by 4 Comments

One of the breakout books of the YA genre was Go Ask Alice, the purported diary of a nameless teenage drug addict and runaway. However, the story behind that book and its follow-up, Jay’s Journal, is far more convoluted and amorally exploitative than anyone would expect. I have actually read Go Ask Alice. I was interested in it because of the controversy surrounding its reality, and reading the protagonist’s wild dash through various illicit drugs made it pretty clear that it was indeed not real. The overblown writing […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo