Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Empathy Served With a Slice of Pie

all that she can see by Carrie Hope Fletcher

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I finished all that she can see by Carrie Hope Fletcher on a plane, January 1, returning from a holiday trip to London. This review isn’t about the trip, but yes, it was lovely. I received this book as a gift while visiting my dear friend in Manchester. “This looked like your kind of read,” she said, “and you need to escape a bit” (or something along those lines, allow me some literary liberties). And it is! The first half, anyway. A deeply empathic baker, […]

And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy is probably very familiar to most Cannonballers, so I won’t spend too long summarizing. A group of four women experts are sent in to investigate Area X, an environmental anomaly that has subsumed and remade a section of coast and wilderness and seems to be expanding. Theirs is the latest in a string of failed expeditions, after previous groups of men have either never returned, or come back changed. The women are given no names, only titles, and […]

← …you have wronged me and my descendants…

The Girl in the Castle by Santa Montefiore

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I am notorious for judging a book by its cover. I am also notorious for trying to read the book jacket as little as possible so that I don’t spoil the plot. I try to get just enough of a peek at it that I can tell if it sounds interesting, but not enough to know too much of the plot (thank you publishers for pretty much spelling out entire novels in the jacket). This practice has often resulted in taking a book out of […]

Each person is a new adventure and some of those adventures are disturbing

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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This book, is a very practical and blunt statement about the part of life people don’t want to think about. People die, and when that happens someone has to take the time and the care to prepare the body. You will learn quickly if this book is for you or if it isn’t. It is gross, and it has a morbid sense of humor that is obviously needed to get through a job where death is in your face every day, sometimes quite literally. Some […]

It’s Not Just You, The World is Collapsing

The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time by Brooke Gladstone

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I idly picked up this slim book—tract? broadside?—at the local bookstore while waiting for my daughter to browse all the new graphic novels. This quick read is probably more potent now than it was upon its original publication in May 2017. The premise: many Americans living in the age of Trump the primary candidate, Trump the Republican nominee, and Trump the President *rightly* feel unmoored from reality. How could we [liberals] so badly misunderstand our fellow Americans? be surprised that our government can be so […]

Overall an amazing alternate history but what I really appreciated was the portrayal of the main character’s anxiety

The Calculating Stars: A Lady Astronaut Novel by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Mary Robinette Kowal seems to lean towards alternate history in her speculative fiction writing.  The Glamourist Histories re-imagines the regency era with illusion magic.  Ghost Talkers creates a WWII in which spiritual mediums talk to recently dead soldiers to get information on battles.  In The Lady Astronaut novels, Kowal has dreamed up an alternate timeline where a gigantic meteorite strikes the Atlantic just off the East coast of the United States in 1952, destroying much of the Eastern seaboard and annihilating most of the US government.  Recovering from […]



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