Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It was my birthday when I found out all the birds were electric.

American Grief in Four Stages by Sadie Hoagland

Shine of the Ever by Claire Rudy Foster

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American Grief in Four Stages – 3/5 Stars I read this book in one go at the coffee shop. It’s short and small in size, so it lends itself to this kind of reading. The stories are not linked by common physical connections, but there’s some thematic elements that worm their way through a lot of the stories. A motif in this collective review, however, is where the marketing and positioning of the book get in the way of the book itself. That’s a failure […]

Teetering on the Edge of Fantastic

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

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While buying a copy of Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble, Amazon alerted me that I “might also like” Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I’ve never read Swamplandia (although I’m totally going to now), and I knew nothing of Russell and her work, but the title sounded awesome and I’m always looking for quality speculative short fiction. I was not disappointed. Russell’s fabulous and her collection is as varied and weird and wonderful as the title suggests. Her work runs the gambit from vampires subsisting on lemons in […]

Getting my nerd card revoked

Unlocking the Air by Ursula K. Le Guin

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You guuuuuuys, I feel terrible, but I did NOT enjoy this. The writing is, of course, incredible. It’s amazing how quickly Le Guin can set a scene and sketch out a character. Even the stories that were only a few pages long had an incredibly clear snapshot of a person or a setting. She can make a character feel real with only a few paragraphs. However. They’re not real stories, which is what my brain had been expecting. A lot of them are completely aimless […]

All I ever wanted to do was teach.

Election by Tom Perrotta

Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta

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Election – 4/5 The publication of this book is kind of curious. Tom Perrotta had had a book rejected or something like that and they asked him if they had anything else to offer, and he pulled this book out. Before it was even published it was already optioned and filming began. So the book came out almost at the same time as the movie. And this was one of those movies I randomly saw in the theater in high school and was blown away […]

The fridged women speak.

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

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The Refrigerator Monologues is a feminist response to the way women are treated in superhero comics. It’s a short read, a novella really, at only 147 pages, but it packs a punch. Riffing on both the stage play The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, and Gail Simone’s website Women in Refrigerators (which coined the term “fridging” for any female character who dies in order to further the plotline or character arc of a man), Valente’s book features six women whose lives were reduced to subplots […]

American Ghost Stories

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

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Claire Vaye Watkins has an infamous father. I don’t point this out in a salacious “looky here” way, but this father looms large over the first story in this collection. Her father is Tex Watson, yes, that Tex Watson. Murderer. Manson Family member. Currently and indefinitely imprisoned Tex Watson who married a prison pen pal and fathered four children while in jail. Claire wrests the reins from her father, her family, and her history to tell her own story- and it’s a doozy. All of […]



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