Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A good and deserving sequel

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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The Testaments is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale and I found it to be just as haunting as its predecessor, perhaps even more so. The significant difference between the two is that The Handmand’s Tail uses a single POV whereas The Testaments uses three characters. That difference comes through in many ways but one in particular that I thought was most interesting is the way that the different books affected the reader. The Handmaid’s Tale through Offred’s POV only shows the world of Gilead […]

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 […]

It worked!

Extreme Makeover by Dan Wells

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How many of negative reviews have I started saying “but the cover looked so pretty!” while making reference to the fact that there is an aphorism against making inferences about outward appearances that literally tells you not to judge a book by its cover? I don’t learn well, apparently, as I’m always doing the literary equivalent of picking up shiny objects and putting them in my mouth. (It’s so pretty! The picture doesn’t do the color intensity justice) Yeah. I bought this after seeing someone […]

Got The Power

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

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Breathe. I’m amused that Blake Crouch blurbed this book. I’ve read a few of his and I always like the concept more than the execution. This is the book he has always wanted to write. This is a legitimately great book. I usually don’t do genre mashups. Give me mystery (my favorite genre) or science fiction (an occasional dabble) but don’t give me both. The Inception-meets-True Detective tagline didn’t inspire me as much as it probably did others who tried this (and for what it’s worth, this […]

The Water Dancer – a brilliant novel

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Since I know Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing the Black Panther comic for a couple of years, and the blurb I read about this book was that it was about a young man with extraordinary abilities, I thought it would be a more action oriented style of novel. I could not have been more wrong. Yes, the main character, Hiram Walker, does possess an ability he calls conducting, but it is used very infrequently in the story as he really does not learn how to use […]

Are We Human or Rabbit?

Watership Down by Richard Adams

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While my father’s bedtime stories to me were Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, my husband’s father read him Watership Down. It’s a book I’d never heard of before meeting him, and as it was a huge part of his childhood, I felt I should finally get around to it. In a word, this book is about rabbits. On a larger scale, this book is about a journey, not unlike the hobbits’ trek in Lord of the Rings. But if you’re looking at this book metaphorically […]



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