Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bodies and Christ

American Rapture by C.J. Leede

This is My Body by Lindsay King-Miller

by Leave a Comment

Being back in grad school, I just do not have the time to read like I used to. However, last week on a retreat, I knocked out two religious horror books I had been meaning to read for a while and since they were both thematically similar, I figured I’d dump the reviews here. American Rapture This is juuuuust clearing the 4-star threshold, mostly because I liked C.J. Leede’s writing, even if her plotting and pacing could frustrate. I also get easily annoyed with survival […]

Morel Dilemma: He Just Couldn’t Resist the Cap

The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley

by Leave a Comment

Hey friends! Guess what? This is my first Cannonball Read review of the year…I’m a little behind. Hahaha…have no fear, I’ve read a lot of books and I’m almost done with teaching for the year so my own Cannonball challenge will be, can I catch up with the review part?!?! Stay tuned! This book though…this book brought me out of review hibernation because I kept trying to think of cool titles for my review.  Some of the discarded ones were: I’m a Fungi: Tales of […]

God help this woman, I sure can’t!

Negative Space by Gillian Linden

by Leave a Comment

“No one is suggesting anyone should react to anything in any particular way.” I think that is the guiding principle of many people who, whether they realize it or not, end up showing tolerance and ambivalence at the same time. And it sums up how I felt about this book. When I first started listening to this book, I thought the narrator was a teenager. She is timid, insecure, anxious, questioning of every little thing around her. I soon realized she is a teacher at […]

An archaeologist, an amusement park employee, a talking pig. Everyone is doing their best.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

by Leave a Comment

In 2020, when many of us began working from home, I started listening to a podcast series called The Happiness Lab. The creators had produced a string of episodes dedicated to coping with the pandemic, and one episode in particular stuck with me. The theme was that, at some point, we would come out on the other side of our current global challenge, and one way to get through it was to think about what kind of story we want to be able to tell […]

The stories of two young men

Hands by Torrey Maldonado

Garvey in the Dark by Nikki Grimes

by Leave a Comment

I needed a short read or two. I found two, while terribly short looking, books that also felt like they would have some “meat” to them. And those books were Hands by Torrey Maldonado and Garvey in the Dark by Nikki Grimes. I was familiar with Grimes, as they are the author of Garvey’s Choice and others I enjoyed reading. But Maldonado was new. Hands looked like it would be a boxing book. And it is, somewhat. But really what the book is about are […]

Je me souviens

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez

by Leave a Comment

A synopsis of the book on its cover reads: “three strangers are thrown together in one Manhattan apartment: a solitary writer; a Gen Z college drop-out; and a spirited parrot named Eureka.” Yes and no – yes, some may argue that it is the central story but for me that is generalizing just one aspect of the book. The Vulnerables is more about the musings and observations of the central character (the writer) from her point of view all centered around the onset of the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo