Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I guess I’m one of the few people who really liked this one!

Book of Night (Book of Night, #1) by Holly Black

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This has been getting pretty bad reviews, especially for how anticipated it was. Most of my friends have given it three stars or lower, or DNFed it. I was determined not to let that affect me, and I’m so glad I didn’t! This is a deceptively small book that gets off to a weird start, but as I kept going, I found myself so drawn in emotionally, and really invested in Charlie and her relationship especially with Vince, her mysterious boyfriend. I loved Vince right […]

Everybody is sleeping on this one, and they shouldn’t be!!

The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings

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This book was incredibly imaginative but also sometimes confusing, but overall a very good time. I was going to Review Amnesty this book but it hasn’t broken out like I hoped it would do, and I would like to see more people reading it, so I am going to say some stuff. This is an extremely imaginative adult fantasy book, despite three of the main characters being children, set in an alternate New Orleans that is just called Nola. In this Nola, magic is commonplace, […]

“They were supposed to grow up with their hands in each other’s pockets, compensating for one another’s weaknesses, encouraging one another’s strengths.”

Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1) by Seanan McGuire

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This was my first Seanan McGuire book, which is a little unbelievable, both because she writes in genres I love, and because she writes so very prolifically. And I started with a really good one. I’m not against spoilers and frequently spoil myself for things, but I went into this book almost completely unspoiled, even for the premise, and I think that’s the way to go. The book is so weird it’s almost impossible to really sum up in a blurb anyway. So, how to […]

Embarrassment, as it turns out, is more powerful than information. And shame is the enemy of truth.

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

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This is one of those books that I will be thinking about long after I finished it. When, in 1955, hundreds of thousands of women of all ages spontaneously turn into dragons, the government’s official statement is that the women “disappeared.” Scientists who defy the government’s gaslighting call it the “Mass Dragoning” and begin to study the phenomenon. Much of that study is driven undergound by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Meanwhile, families are left to pick through the wreckage, both literally and figuratively, of […]

A wonderful SF/F anthology for young adults (and really anyone!)

Firebirds by Edited by Sharyn November

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In retrospect so many of the books I loved from a young reader until today were published under the Firebird imprint, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been contemporaneous with what were clearly great years for their publishing program. Just looking at the list of books that takes up the first two pages here — Lloyd Alexander, Nancy Farmer, Sylvia Engdahl, Brian Jacques, Robin McKinley,  Tanith Lee, etc — and then considering the additional star power of this anthology — Charles Vess, Garth Nix, […]

“…we’re the dream that humanity creates to make sense of the shadows on the cave wall.”

American Gods: Author’s Preferred Text by Neil Gaiman

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I watched the first season American Gods on Starz back in the day, and I really enjoyed it but never bothered with the rest of the series once I heard that the show runner and several stars were out of the project. I’ve had the novel on my shelf ever since, but its length (500+ pages) was a little off-putting. It’s a funny thing though that the “long” stories are often the ones that read the fastest while the “short” ones can be a slog. […]



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