Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Be warned, then: the collected volumes of this series will contain frozen mountains, foetid swamps, hostile foreigners, hostile fellow countrymen, the occasional hostile family member, bad decisions, misadventures in orienteering, diseases of an unromantic sort, and a plenitude of mud.”

A Natural History of Dragons (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #1) by Marie Brennan

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I finally started this series! I put book one on my TBR back when it was first published and then never got around to it, not even after I met the author at a book festival and got a signed copy of book three (I did not yet own books one or two, but it was the only one available for signing). Maybe I would have gotten to it sooner if I would have realized one of my favorite audiobook narrators, Kate Reading, does the […]

If you don’t love Book 1, do you keep going with Book 2?

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

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I have a coworker who says “I don’t want to get out over my skis” a lot. I had never heard that expression before, but this book really feels like it encapsulates the phrase. The ideas are interesting, and the two main characters are great, but it feels like the story and the writing never quite live up to the concept. This is an alternate history about the Underground Railroad and the uncertain times after the Civil War – except with magic. The story starts […]

I’ll make a man out of myself (Bingo!)

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

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CBR14 Bingo: Star (Zhu might be described as something of a rising star within the Chinese power structure of the day, and also the sun is literally a star. I’m so very clever). Back in the 14th Century, the Mongols had conquered and ruled Imperial China. In a small village, drought and famine have killed the majority of the population. A nameless girl (one of the few children left in the village) has managed to stay alive thanks to her ingenuity. When her older brother, […]

Injustice: Gods Among Us Year One

Injustice: Gods Among Us Year One by Tom Taylor

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My experience has been that most comic based on video games are…less than stellar. And when I have not even played the game on which it is based, I am even more reluctant to read the book. However, my son’s oldest friend has been asking me to read this for several years and so I started it this month. I am so glad I listened to him as this was a fun and interesting read. The main concept is that Superman “Breaks bad” and Batman […]

Have I moved on emotionally from Gail Carriger?

Prudence (The Custard Protocol, #1) by Gail Carriger

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This was a perfectly fine and entertaining book that I for some reason had a hard time picking up and making myself finish, and I feel almost no pull to continue and finish the series. This is such a huge turnaround for what my feelings were about her first series, The Parasol Protectorate, which featured the main character of this book’s mother. I was enchanted and delighted by those books. Our main character here is Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama, and I’m not even going to […]

First contact, near-past historical science fiction.

Axiom's End (Noumena, #1) by Lindsay Ellis

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 1/30 I don’t even really know what I want to say about this one! It wasn’t what I was expecting, even though I didn’t think I was going in expecting anything. Figure that one out. All I knew was that it was a First Contact story, and I liked the cover. I think I also might have known it took place in 2007. Our main character is twenty-one year old Cora*, whose father is basically an answer […]



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