Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A World You Want To Wear Like a Blanket

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

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Becky Chambers’ first Monk & Robot book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, struck a chord in me in a way that few other books have. Chambers built a world so beautiful, so full of hope, that I just wanted to curl up in it like a blanket. She continues that glorious world-building in the second book, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Picking up right after book 1, we join Sibling Dex and Mosscap as they re-enter human territory and plan to introduce Mosscap to the […]

an overly-rosy wintry fairy tale

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

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The description of The Snow Child kinda intrigued me when it first came out, and I do love novels that put a fresh spin on old fairy tales. Then a friend mentioned loving it, so I thought, why not, and  put it on my digital library holds, because it’d be fine as a dog-walking read, probably. The novel focuses on an older couple, Jack and Mabel, who moved to Alaska and are homesteading there in the 1910s following heartbreaks in their former life on the East […]

A strange little fantasy. I expected nothing less from this author.

City of Last Chances (The Tyrant Philosophers, #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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This is a tough book to sink your teeth into. It’s slow to start, and slow to catch your emotions (if it ever catches them all), but still, for the right reader this book could work very well. I always appreciate a well-executed attempt at a unique structure, and we have that here in abundance. Up front, though, the reason this is getting 3.5 stars is that though there were bits that caught my imagination in the first half of the book, it didn’t really […]

Summer of 1999

Home is Where The Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose (Author), January LaVoy (Narrator), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator), Brittany Pressley (Narrator), Andrew Eiden (Narrator)

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We sometimes (sort of jokingly but also sort of not) say in my immediate family that we only get together with the extended family when there is a wedding or when there is a funeral.  Big life events bring people together, and it is the passing of their mother (Laura) that brings the siblings in this novel back into each other’s orbits.  And once they are back in each other’s lives, old tensions start to rise, exacerbated by the little fact that, oh yeah, their […]

It is A Truth Universally Acknowledged That a Mantis Shrimp Must Be in Want of Something to Punch

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong

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Ed Yong takes us through the vast world of animal senses with understandable explanations of complicated science and a startling humor that made me laugh out loud, in public, many times. From misquoting Jane Austen to lamenting his poor choices in clothing, Yong adds delightful levity to a complex and fascinating subject. When we think about how animals see the world around them, we are already biasing our analysis based on humanity’s strongest sense, that of sight. How an animal “sees” the world is better […]

The Powerful Pivot

Machiavelli For Women by Stacey Vanek Smith

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Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace is a self-help novel through the lens of The Prince. What can women learn from Machiavelli and apply in the 21st century workplace? A fair bit, as it turns out. Smith has done a decent job here of breaking down the struggles that women face in the professional world and how, with a bit of knowledge, perspective, and strategy, these struggles can be overcome. The book is peppered with real case studies […]



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