Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I taught you better than to open doors you can’t close

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is yet another great example of the kind of book I would have missed had I not started reading more speculative fiction and diversifying the voices in my library. That would have been a pity, because this complex, powerful novel may very well end up at the top of my 2019 favorites list. After Earth suffered an unnamed cataclysm 300 years ago, the remnants of humanity were crowded onto the spaceship Matilda and launched toward some long-forgotten destination. Humanity […]

Cheating Death Never Ends Well

Vicious by VE Schwab

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 I have a cute model, so here you go. 🙂 I got this from Ale as part of the Cannonball read book exchange. I read it only in the daytime, because I am wimpy. Vicious tells the story of two college boys Victor and Eli who start experimenting with cheating death to become EOs, people with extraordinary abilities. There are a lot of interesting ideas in here about good and evil and souls. Eli gets his abilities and becomes a vigilante, killing other people who […]

In Which Jane Kicks Efficient Ass, Especially the Undead Variety

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

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Yes, we might be living in the darkest timeline—or the dumbest, hard to tell. But be glad that you’re not our girl Jane, who contends with cruel racism and incompetence while also decapitating hungry “shamblers,” the reanimated corpses of the Gettysburg fallen and any poor soul bitten thereafter. Some years ago, the paddy wagon plucked Jane McKeene from her home at Rose Hill plantation so that she might learn the finer points of combat and decorum at Miss Preston’s, Baltimore’s finest school for Negro girls. […]

What might happen if a fan got to live inside her favorite story.

The Fandom by Anna Day

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“What the fuck is the fandom?” — Reagan, Fangirl Every time I have seen the title of this book, or the word “fandom” in any context since 2013 (the year Fangirl was published), I have thought of this line.  And it somehow feels fitting for my reaction to this book to be precluded by a quote from another (better) book, because The Fandom just did almost nothing for me as a reader. This was actually the first book I picked out of my brand new […]

“There’s a resistance?” The word sounds sweet as I say it. “Honey, there’s always a resistance.”

Vox by Christina Dalcher

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I will be honest, I disliked this book so much that I almost feel like I can’t even begin to write a fair review of it. That said. I thought this book was so shamelessly bad, I am made worse by having read it. This book is about a not-too-distant version of the world in which a Conservative Christian government has taken over and installed tech on women to keep them from reading, writing, or speaking more than 100 words per day, including children. The […]

“It’s a cruel, cruel world. And the people are the worst part.”

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

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In Justina Ireland’s America, nobody won the Civil War. The war simply never ended, because of the shamblers. The shamblers are the dead that rose up from the battlefields of Gettysburg and began to walk, hungry for blood and flesh. The country needed to band together to fight this new threat, and the war simply petered out. Most of the cities in the South are simply gone. Burned. Destroyed. Overrun by shamblers. The cities in the North are doing slightly better, but its hard to […]



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