Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Who doesn’t like a sci-fi romp?

Head On by John Scalzi

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Recently on twitter, John Scalzi shared a one-star review of one of his books he found. In the review, the writer was upset that Scalzi wrote easily readable sci-fi “romps”. Like me, Scalzi had a hard time finding why writing something that could be described as a romp would be bad. Romps are usually fun, right? Anyway, all of this is to say that Scalzi’s second foray into the world he established in Lock-in is fun, slick and dare I say another romp. Head On, […]

Damn, she’s good

The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

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Reading ClaireBadger’s review of 84K reminded me of how much I enjoyed Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August last year, and I was inspired to move another of her novels to the top of my TBR list. I’m happy to say I was not disappointed, as The Sudden Appearance of Hope was every bit as much mind-bending fun. As Hope says on the first page, the world began to forget her when she was sixteen years old: first her teachers, then her […]

Get lured in by the world-building, stay for the intersectional dissection of oppression

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?” Most people don’t deeply question (cough, Kanye, cough) why enslaved people “allowed” themselves to remain enslaved. But most of us also don’t dwell deeply on what systematic physical and psychological trauma would be needed to keep a whole class of people oppressed and how that trauma may ripple out generationally. And why would we? Envisioning something like that is […]

This SHOULD have been a duology

Renegades by Marissa Meyer

Archenemies by Marissa Meyer

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The Renegades series by Marissa Meyer was supposed to be a duology. The first book, Renegades, tells the story of Gatlin City, a far distant US (probably) where people with super powers started appearing, and chaos quickly descended. A group of anarchists ruled the city, with the help of gangs. (It is unclear if members of the gangs have powers, or are just not nice people.) The Anarchists are overthrown by a group with powers (called prodigies) known as the Renegades. At the start of […]

What are you worth?

84K by Claire North

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Theo is an average citizen in a fairly average dystopia. You know the kind: human rights violations are normal, everyone is scared, and the government wields unilateral power with virtually no opposition; or, to be more accurate, The Company (a mega corp) runs the government, which wields power with virtually no opposition. Everyday, Theo gets up, goes to work, calculates the financial costs of crimes to society, slaps a bill on the perpetrator, bothers absolutely no one, stands up not even for himself (to the […]

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky – Short Story Perfection

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

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If you don’t yet know about the LeVar Burton podcast, “LeVar Burton Reads” let me have the distinct pleasure of being the one to tell you about it. LeVar Burton, he of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: TNG reads you short stories. AND IT IS THE BEST THING EVER. He is an amazing reading and storyteller and just brings a big ol’ story to my face. Each episode is 45 minutes to about an hour, and he reads you the story and at the end, […]



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