Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This Is How You Break Your Readers

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

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I don’t think Faintingviolet had even finished this book before promising to hand it off to me. And at this point in our friendship, I don’t question her if she’s recommending a book. I just accept, and this book…..holy moly, this book….. Before we get to why I was utterly destroyed at the hands of This is How You Lose the Time War, we have to go back to my first book recommendation to Faintingviolet. I had read a book called The Illuminator that wrecked […]

Really good, and I can see why Twitter and CBR love it, but not quite for me

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

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I read Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy last year and loooooooved it, so when The City We Became showed up as the choice for a meetup group book club, I was excited enough to plan to attend and not just lurk. While I did like it, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did Broken Earth. When a city has enough people, history, culture, and personality, it can come alive, with a person becoming the living avatar of that city. New York City has hit […]

Annual Short Story Collection Round-up

New York Fantastic: Fantasy Stories from the City that Never Sleeps by Paula Guran & Others

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Because I’d never ask my students to do something I wouldn’t do, and also because NK Jemisin highly suggests reading short stories to get better at writing long stories, I try to read a short story collection every year. For whatever reason, no matter how good the writing is, short story collections take me EONS to finish, and New York Fantastic was no exception. With twenty stories by different speculative authors, New York Fantastic offers a wide variety of story types and a nice selection of award […]

The Rights of Women and Machines

The Haunting of Tramcar 015 by P. Djeli Clark

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Bingo 14: Machinery The Haunting of Tramcar 015 takes place in the same world as many of the author’s other works, a steampunk alternative history version of Cairo. The titular tramcar is a major part of the setting, the plot, and we even get some attention to the technical specs on how the tech is supposed to work; thus I would argue this novella/novelette qualifies for the technology focus square. The other reason for the label is that there’s a pretty detailed discussion of whether […]

When the only person who knows all the secrets is six

Spy x Family vol 5 by Tatsuya Endo

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Bingo 13: Self Care I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned in previous reviews that I tend to turn to manga and comics for comfort reading. One of my current favorite series is Spy X Family, in which a husband, wife, and daughter are gathered and have to present an ideal picture to the world, but things can get awkward at home since everyone has a major secret: Dad is a spy, Mom’s an assassin, Bond the dog who gets premonitions of the future, and daughter is […]

More superheroine action and romance!

Heroine Worship by Sarah Kuhn

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CBR 13 Bingo: Rec’d – I’m reading this series because of teresaelectro’s recommendation! Heroine Worship is the second book in Sarah Kuhn’s “Heroine Complex” series.  In the first volume, Heroine Complex  Evie Tanaka is a restrained, quiet assistant and best friend of super heroine, Aveda Jupiter, with a secret, she’s been hiding her own fire superpower.  This time around, Aveda is the narrator and the story picks up about three months after the events in the first novel.  It is discovered that a minor demon is […]



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