Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It All Started, as Great Tales Often Do, With a Book.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow

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Well, the Hugo Awards came and went this weekend, and I never did get around to writing up reviews for all the Best Novel nominees beforehand – oops! The winner, for the curious, was A Memory Called Empire, which I wrote a review for here. However, the playing field was really hyper-competitive this year, and I really owe it to the nominees to write my thoughts about them as well Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January has to be commended for having some […]

Tricked Into a YA Romance

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Lainie Taylor

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In trying to find an agent for my own novel, I asked my friends to suggest some of their favorite books that closely resembled my fantasy so that I could shamelessly query the agents of those books for my own devices. Faintingviolet lent me Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I had no idea going into this book what it was since I’d never heard of Lainie Taylor before. But faintingviolet knows I’m not a huge fan of YA, and I pretty much avoid romance at any […]

The Greatest Library that Never Was

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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I was a huge fan of the Night Circus, so I was ecstatic when the lovely faintingviolet shared her copy of the Starless Sea with me. To give too much of the plot away takes all the joy out of reading this story, but the baseline is that there’s a magical library hidden underground accessible by doorways above. The nature through which patrons find these doors varies to fate, and in recent years, someone’s been closing all the doors. At least until a grad student named Zachery stumbles […]

What would happen if women could thoroughly, completely, permanently turn the tables?

The Power by Naomi Alderman

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I feel like this was meant to be a cautionary tale, with an ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ type of message, but maybe I was in the wrong mindset for it, because my reaction was way more on the side of “FRAK YEAH, GET ‘EM!!!” All of a sudden, teenage girls all over the world develop the power to produce electricity from their fingertips. A (long-dormant? brand new?) organ called a skein, located over the collarbone, allows the girls to create and deploy electricity. Parents and […]

BIGFOOT!

Devolution by Max Brooks

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… Or, more accurately, BIGFEET. Wait! Don’t go! I know it sounds silly but trust me, this was a good read! Max Brooks, who brought genuine terror and superior storytelling to the Zombie genre, has now turned his sights on the Sasquatch. And he does a bloody great job of it. Here’s the premise: A group of privileged folk (artists, authors, wealthy vegan tech types) are living out their homesteading, off-grid fantasy in the very small eco-community called Greenloop in the mountains near Seattle. They […]

One Ring To Rule Them All…..

The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien

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My first encounter with the enormous doorstop that is Tolkien’s classic was when I was ten and my dad read it to me as a bedtime story. I blame him, and these books for my obsession with fantasy and the ridiculous amount of Pinterest boards I’ve dedicated to LOTR and Hobbit fan art.  Even so, sitting down to re-read the doorstop is a commitment I’m not usually ready to make, so for a long time, the movies have kept my obsessions alive. But pandemic lock […]



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