Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Going out with a bang (in more ways than one)

Dance with the Devil by Kit Rocha

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4.5 stars After his father died, Rafael “Rafe” Morales basically sold himself to TechCorps and agreed to become a technologically enhanced supersoldier, so he could make enough money to keep his widowed mother and younger siblings safe. He didn’t really know what signing away his life would entail, and given the choice again, he probably would have chosen differently. He hasn’t been able to see them for years, certainly not since he and his team, the Silver Devils, had to fake their own deaths to […]

A bridging book, but a really good one

The Devil You Know by Kit Rocha

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Maya used to be Marjorie Chevalier, but had to change her identity after she escaped the evil super scientists at TechCorps, where she was trained as a data courier (basically a human hard drive), with her senses specially enhanced to remember flawlessly everything she hears, reads, sees, hears and experiences. She used to work for one of the Vice Presidents of TechCorps who was secretly orchestrating a rebellion, However, her boss (also the only maternal figure Maya ever knew) was caught and executed, and Maya […]

Free Will

System Collapse: The Murderbot Diaries Book 7 by Martha Wells

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I read all the previous Murderbot stories at the beginning of CBR14 (reviews here, here and here), and while the details of those novels were perhaps a little fuzzy for me when I started this latest Murderbot, I was quickly up to speed and enjoying the continuing saga of everyone’s favorite misanthropic human-robot hybrid. As usual I zipped through this and loved it for its snarky humor and for its development of Murderbot’s relationships with the humans it works for and the artificial intelligence it […]

My first DNF

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

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I wanted to love this book. On the face of it, it ticks off a lot of boxes that appeal to me. It could be that my mind is unfocused right now because a lot is going on at home, but I really think there is a problem with this book. I’d never heard of it before the movie came out and maybe I know why. It’s tedious and pedantic. Poor Things is a kind of Mary Shelley Frankenstein story where the “monster” is a […]

“our evening stories pushing back the brutal dark”

Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara by Vona Groarke

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I hit burnout sometime around idk when last year, and while I kept on reading, I definitely stopped writing reviews. But now a new semester is staring me in the face, and I have a project I want to procrastinate on, so here’s a review, because I have been reading like a fiend these first two weeks of January, and this might be my favorite thing I’ve read so far this year (might sound like faint praise but I am 13 books deep already). I’ve […]

Books that come out of nowhere to become favorites

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

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 As a reader, I find few things more satisfying than stumbling upon a novel expecting nothing but a pleasant diversion and instead falling completely in love with it. My husband found A Gentleman in Moscow in a Little Free Library and took it home because the description and the cover appealed to him. (I probably wouldn’t have picked it up, though it does have a nice cover.) He described the story as “charming” and recommended I try it. We were both thrilled that I was […]



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