Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Bookseller by day, book reader by night...and hopefully a reviewer somewhere in between. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: andtheIToldYouSos's Quick Questions interview.)

andtheIToldYouSos's Reviews:

Oh Murderbot, why did it take me so long to heed your call?

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

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Thank you again, Cannonballers, for alerting me to another treasure that would have stayed hidden from me had I not seen your many rave reviews!  I am a sucker for both “robot learns to person” and “people learn to robot” stories; I do not know why it took me so long to give Murderbot a go! Earlier this year I was awed by the beauty of A Closed and Common Orbit, but this time I was delighted by some good old-fashioned gruesome space violence. Our […]

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad…House

It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

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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 […]

less practical, more magical

The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

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Twenty two years after the publication of Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman fired up the ol’ Owens Family Cauldron to brew up (I apologize for NOTHING) the story of “The Aunts”. Before Jet and Franny were kooky caregivers with cupboards full of teeth and dove hearts, they were kids squirming under the overbearing but uninvolved eyes of their midcentury modern parents. Necessarily, when re-approaching a well-defined but of-its-time creation, one must get a little creative with facts and figures. Practical Magic was already a bit screwy with time, […]

“My book-ordering history is definitely going to get me flagged by some evil government algorithm. Lots and lots of books about Vichy France and the French Resistance and more books than any civilian could possibly need about spy craft and fascism. Luckily, there is a Jean Rhys novel in there and a book for Eli called How to Draw Robots. That’ll throw them off the scent.”

Weather by Jenny Offill

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Jenny Offill’s latest exercise in approaching anxiety with compassion, Weather, kicks off right before the 2016 election. While she isn’t that exact- you come to realization through context clues- the time and feeling is accurate and thick in the air. Just like in Dept. of Speculation, Offill packs years worth of pathos into a collection close to just 200 pages. Her economy of vocabulary is something that I strive to possess. Our narrator is worried about wasting time; she sits on an unfinished masters while answering […]

the Sanderson sisters are still my favorite witchy siblings, but the Owens family are not messing around!

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

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Lookout y’all, it’s re-read time! Alice Hoffman used to be a favorite author of mine; we slowly went our separate ways after The Museum of Extraordinary Things. There was no big breakup; we just grew apart. We wanted different things. The separation was so slow and gentle that I forgot that she was an author that I really liked, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a new prequal to Practical Magic hitting the shelves, oh wait, there already was a prequal? This […]

Markov Chain Text Generator – the Mystery Novel!

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

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This book seems like it has everything: Iron Age sacrificial burials! Dangerous saltwater marshes! Academics drawn into police investigations! Bird enthusiasts! New Age mysticism! Scary Biblical passages! Gruff but sensitive detectives! Murder! Cats! Bones! All of the things that would normally draw me into the depths of a novel- there was a promise of being sucked out to sea in the dangerous salt marshes, but I was left on shore squinting into the distance with an annoyed “is that it?” stuck in my craw. The […]



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