Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An Immersive World

The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope

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I love a good immersive world in fantasy and speculative fiction, where you feel like you could be in the setting. The Monsters We Defy takes place in Washington, DC in 1925, and Clara Johnson, the main character, can communicate with spirits. I listened to the audio book of this, and Shayna Small does an exceptional job with the voices and the setting and making you invested in the story. I am not surprised to see this won the Audie award for best audio book […]

Last Defender of Camelot – one of Zelazny’s best

Last Defender of Camelot by Roger Zelazny

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After finishing a book I really hated, I needed to cleanse my palate, so to speak. The song Guinevere from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came on and I realized it had been a while since I had re-read The Last Defender of Camelot. It does not disappoint. Is the style a bit dated? Sure. Are there some problematic passages in “Damnation Alley”? Without question, especially the Nazi ones and the handling of female characters in that story (one reason why this received 4 stars […]

The journey back home

Frontera by Julio Anta

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When I first picked up the reader copy of Frontera, even having seen it advertised in multiple newsletters and as an online reader copy, I only noticed the kid on the front cover. I missed the ghost figure in the back. The colors of this cover I am assuming are meant to represent the desert our narrator is traveling through, but it washes out the man in the background. However, this is an interesting design choice as this character is an interesting piece of the […]

“…with understanding, all things were possible.”

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

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Riddle me this: what do you create when you combine a violin prodigy, “the Queen of Hell”, and an alien doughnut maker? If you are Ryka Aoki, you create a wild, delicious, devastating, hilarious brew. Does it hold together in a tight narrative? Light from Uncommon Stars does not. Does it thrill your senses and grow your heart? It absolutely does. We are first introduced to Katrina Nguyen, a teenage trans girl, as she is running away from a brutal home, carrying her beloved violin. […]

April 2023 Leftovers

Lady Boss by Jackie Collins

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

Flux by Jinwoo Choo

The Cutie by Donald Westlake

The Boy with the Faster Brain by Peter Shankman

The Widening Gyre by Robert B. Parker

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Happy spring! Lady Boss** So after two books and almost 2k pages of enough internalized misogyny to make Phyllis Schlafly blush, with stories chock full of men and women who will literally hump anyone and anything, Jackie Collins suddenly decides to make Lucky purchase a movie studio…in order to get rid of casting couches and male dominance in favor of female-driven movies that are less horny. What? Whatever. I’ll still keep reading this garbage. The Hunting Party*** I was prepared to write about this being […]

Family secrets and a ghost story

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

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I do love the tagline- She was trouble, so is her ghost. First book of the year (well first review), first CBR Passport book (book about another country).  This was a book that i suggested for my IRL book club (because i already owned it), so the review considers their responses as well. While I have owned “Sorcerer to the Crown” for a number of years I have never quite gotten into it and it took reading a book of short stories by Zen Cho […]



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