Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Like a tumescent Ronald Reagan on the fourth of July

The Rider of Lost Creek by Louis L'Amour

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Growing up, my dad had a sizable collection of books written by Louis L’Amour. They were all part of a matching set, with brown leatherette covers (hey, you can still buy them). I always liked the look of them, taking up the bottom shelf of the family bookcase. For a while, in my teens, I blew through them, and remember finding them enjoyable. This time? Not so much. Louis L’Amour published 100 novels and over 250 short stories in his long career, and is as […]

That will teach Mother to lock her up in a tower…. ah tree-tower

Rapunzel’s Revenge Book 1 by Shannon and Dean Hale

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It is rare that I reread a book especially if I remember reading it at least once before. And if I do, it tends not to be right away. However, Rapunzel’s Revenge Book 1 by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale (along with illustrations by Nathan Hale, no relation) was a book that I thought deserved a second read. This is for several reasons. The first was that it was not flowing a hundred percent smoothly text-wise. I thought perhaps I had skipped a panel or […]

Damn the Man

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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I listened to Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars last year and enjoyed it, but this was even better. Upright Women Wanted is set in a Wild West style world from the future, where a continuous war has torn the country apart and men dominate society. Information, the tool we use to grow and learn and resist, is tightly controlled with approved materials from the Librarians. The goal for this society is to keep people uneducated and very carefully educated. At the start of the story, […]

This is what it means to be a woman in the world. Every step is a bargain with pain.

Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne Valente

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I’m a big fan of Catherynne Valente (go read her Fairytale series, do it!) and Six-Gun Snow White does not disappoint.  In this Wild West retelling of Snow White, Snow is a mixed race gunslinger. Here’s the summary from the Subterranean Press: A plain-spoken, appealing narrator relates the history of her parents—a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. With her mother’s death in childbirth, so begins a […]

Tana French is back with a vengeance and a penchant for Wild West-isms, and I am HERE. FOR. IT. 

The Searcher by Tana French

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This is a safe review; I’ll give you no spoilers and I’ll give you no major plot points- but I will let you know that no, we have not returned to the Dublin Murder Squad. While I found the departure disappointing in The Witch Elm, I found it thrilling here; the idyllic landscape filled with the insidious creep of small town communities. While we have not returned to the Murder Squad, we have returned to having a protagonist on the searching side of the law- and […]

cbr12bingo – Green (and another Bingo!)

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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I wanted so much more from this little dusty sketch of the dystopian west. It had a helluva hook – outlaw lesbians! Gun-slinging sisters-in-resistance! Non-binary action heroes! Unfortunately, it ground to a halt far short of its potential destination. It begins as all westerns do: someone hanging taut at the end of a rope. There are western tropes a-plenty; rough-riding, chaw-spitting, howdy pardnering, thankya kindly ma’ams litter the landscape. This wild west is wild for a different reason, though: we’re in a thinly plotted dystopia. […]



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