Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A book overflowing with queer kindness

Tell Me Anything by Skye Kilaen

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The thing about Skye Kilaen is that she has so much compassion for her characters and her stories are so full of kindness that when she rips my still beating heart out of my chest in chapter one, I keep reading because I trust my heart in her hands. Skye writes beautiful LGBTQ+ romances, she’s self published, and unless you hang out in the right book circles, you probably don’t know who she is. But you should, because she’s so gooooooooood. Tell Me Anything is […]

Angels of Punching You in the Face

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Earth’s crust and mantle have been peeled back by the Architects and shaped into a beautiful flower. A beautiful, uninhabitable flower. Maybe this is a reflection of my age, but I kept thinking about how clean spaceships were in science fiction when I started reading. The governments were huge global or galactic entities demonstrating how humans had unified, and often how they had integrated into a system of many alien species. There was an orderliness to science fiction worlds, even if the protagonists were rogues […]

“Aren’t you that notorious bad girl April French?”

For the Love of April French by Penny Aimes

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We meet April and Dennis just before they meet each other. The first couple of chapters of For the Love of April French capture perfectly that feeling of endless possibility when you meet a potential new romantic partner – all the wonder of meeting someone you want to know better and all the fear that they will be awful, or reject you when they get to know you. It’s an expansive, joyful, terrifying feeling and Penny Aimes nails it. For the Love of April French […]

“Look. I realize you’re a complex individual. But let’s just say that cute’s definitely in there.”

Uncharted by Adriana Anders

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If there is an animal in a suspense book, I spend the whole book worrying. So first off, the dog is fine. Adriana Anders’ Whiteout was one of my most unexpected favorite reads of last year. The  second book in the Survival Instincts series, Uncharted, continues the overarching story of thwarting Chronos’ quest for genocide and profit. This time, pilot Leo Eddowes and her team are trying to find a scientist hiding in the mountains of Alaska before Chronos finds him. Only a half step […]

Being Human is a Revolution

The Devil You Know by Kit Rocha

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Kit Rocha’s pragmatic, chaotic optimists have gotten me through the last few years. I’m going to need a bunch of you to buy Deal With the Devil and The Devil You Know, or request that your library buy them, so that I get more of these post-apocalyptic do-gooding murder ladies and sourdough making supersoldier daddies to help me hold onto hope amid the rising tide of authoritarianism, the crumbling wall between church and state, and the increased concentration of wealth into a few hands. I […]

There was a game he could see and another he couldn’t, and he would play them both.

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington

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My formative King Arthur works were the 1963 Disney movie The Sword in the Stone, and 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When I discovered Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, as a preteen, my life as a reader of fantasy and romance was set. I’m a King Arthur enthusiast, but not a purist (except for Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 King Arthur – great cast, beautiful visuals, terrible movie that should never have been marketed as “historically accurate”). Hearing that a work is a retelling of […]



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