Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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 […]

This is Jezebel in Hell

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The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente is a super meta, feminist, hilariously sarcastic novella about women in comic books. I’ve said before that Valente can be hit or miss with me, I love her and even the misses are still fantastic but sometimes her books don’t resonate with me. This one though? This one I devoured and I am considering going back for a second helping. It’s… great. If I’m really honest, it’s probably more of a four and a half star read (partly […]

A Sad, Disappointing End

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The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home is the conclusion to Catherynne Valente’s Fairland series for middle grade readers. The first book was a revelation, and is the book that introduced me to Valente. I adored that book, loved it. I enjoyed the second and third books as well, though I don’t think they ever managed to really re-capture the magic in the first book. However the fourth book, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, was a huge disappointment. Still, even given that I’d been […]

Growing Up is a Treacherous Endeavor

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“A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it it has been taught to sit up or lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folks are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they’ve got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don’t have one at all. It is the very […]

More Fairyland, Please!

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After reading the first of Catherynne Valente’s Fairyland series on sort of a whim, I immediately bought the rest of the series, hoping that the sequels would live up to the first.  And book #2 did not disappoint!  In fact, I think I enjoyed it even more than the first.  It’s a bit darker, and a bit richer, and a bit more profound. Our protagonist, September, has been out of Fairyland for a year, living in Nebraska with her mother while her father is off at […]



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