Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The audiobook is a must.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Happy pub day to this lovely little book 🙂 Okay, I’m rounding this up to five stars because I can’t stop thinking about it. Setting aside re-reads, I think this might actually be the best book I read in February. This is a fairytale-esque novella about two sisters who sing to willow trees and have to deal with unwanted and wanted suitors, and it’s about the strength of […]

Skillful Language, Elusive Impact

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

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You can read this book quickly, but don’t. Take your time. This book calls for attention. There is so much wordplay, sometimes intricate and subtle, which calls for re-reading sentences or paragraphs. I’m sure that I missed quite a bit both because of the depth of wordplay and because I only have so much patience, but the authors are just so skillful in their use of language (e.g., “Who’s infecting whom? We know from our hoarse Trojans, in my time”). The novella follows Red and […]

Twitter Win Fizzles

This is How You Lost the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

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Twitter was kind of saved from doom recently by a guy loudly and proudly promoting his favorite new book, and encouraging others to do the same. I approve of this behavior. I was with Bigolas Dickolas (a Monty Python reference, I hope) in his enthusiasm for about the first half of This is How You Lose the Time War, but then it lost me. The problem for me is that there is not enough world and character building to hold interest and keep the story […]

“I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.”

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

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Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Recommended I’m always eager for a good recommendation, and my friend Mindi gave me this one. She is one of my very best pals, but our book tastes do not often align, in fact, we are predictably unpredictable in giving each other solid recs. We’ve joked about needing to catalog our reads and likes to find the determining factors to create a Venn diagram of where our tastes comingle because it’s that ineffable. So far, of books we have both read, […]

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 […]

“Keep Reading. Keep Writing. Keep Fighting. We’re all still here.”

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

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I was intimidated by this book, which feels like a strange thing to say about a book that measures no more than 7 inches tall and less than 200 pages. But I was. A book that inspires so many positive, nay gushing, reviews that also seems to leave the reviewer at a loss for how to describe the book (see please reviews by Aquillia, andtheIToldYouSos, carriejay, and emmalita as a place to start) had me putting it on and taking it off my to read […]



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