Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein.”

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

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CBR 13 Bingo Square: Fauna This is How You Lose the Time War came highly recommended by Cannonballers and all sorts of ‘best of lists’, it’s even a staff pick at Mysterious Galaxy (where it completes a separate bingo square for their summer reading bingo!).  I’m happy to report that it lived up to all the hype.  This is a love story unlike any I have read before, due to the science fiction setting and non-human characters, but it contains classic elements; enemies to lovers, […]

As the Prophets Say, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”

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

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I cannot explain this book. It is an enemies to lovers story divorced from time, place and humanity while also steeped in all three. Red and Blue are operatives in opposites sides of a time war. I don’t have any idea who the sides are or why they fight. I don’t know what’s at stake. There is no good guy or bad guy. None of that matters though. What does matter are the letters Blue and Red exchange. Initially it’s two enemies taunting each other […]

Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.

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

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I feel like this is a good one for this group of readers for a handful of reasons. This is a short novel told in vignettes and letters and small conversations. It’s about two different soldiers or time travelers (though it’s more appropriate to say they are inter-dimensional travelers) of warring or competing factions. So they travel to different times and universes or threads of the same universe. They sometimes meet up and sometimes are able to communicate with each other. And they’re in love […]

Drop-kick That Magic Lamp into Mount Doom

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin (editors)

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Short story collections are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you have to gnaw some nuts and chews to eventually find that chocolate truffle. That said, The Djinn Falls in Love is phenomenal. Six of the twenty-one stories are among the best short stories I have read. Ever. (Jhumpa Lahiri, I’m sorry to report that you’ve been bumped.)  The editors’s international ensemble of authors clearly did their research, populating their confident tales with every manner of djinn, jinn, and genie. Some lie in wait in […]

Honey a Day

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I so loved Amal El-Mohtar’s story in The Starlit Woods that I went searching for other books by her. Sadly, it seems that most of her writing is in the form of short stories for various anthologies, however there was this collection of poems and short stories. I picked it up, and it’s quite good. I enjoyed the short stories a bit more then the poetry, but I’m a bit out of practice with poetry. El-Mohtar was given a sampling of honey and she spread […]



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