Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A time warp Ikea

Finna by Nino Cipri

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Finna by Nino Cipri was another Lawless Book Club read back in January. In this science fiction novella, we meet Ava and Jules who work at an Ikea-inspired furniture store called  LitenVärld. They’ve recently broken up and are having issues navigating their work and now-only friendship status. Ava is anxious and unsure of what she wants from anything. Jules is Black and non-binary and more zen about the break-up. They’ve worked through much of their trauma and can’t force Ava to figure herself out. Before […]

Murder, Mayhem and Meatballs

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

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On a dark night, three people come together to discover who has been vandalising their store: reluctant but cash-strapped Amy, pleasant but lonely Ruth Anne and manager Basil, whose corporate hard-on is probably the most terrifying thing in this book. The store they work at is Orsk, a wannabe Ikea chain of cheap DIY furniture stores (Ikea is acknowledged as the superior brand here but really, for all intents and purposes, Orsk IS Ikea). It doesn’t take long for things to go awry: a mysterious […]

“Wormholes tend to travel in packs.”

FINNA by Nino Cipri

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Well this was an adorable little slice of a book. A wormhole opens in a giant IKEA-like store, a customer wanders through it, and two disgruntled employees (who have recently broken up and have been trying to avoid each other) are assigned to go fetch her, using a FINNA device to track her down. Ava and Jules hate their soul-sucking retail jobs but love each other, even though their various neuroses have made them incompatible. When the employees are all herded into a break room […]

Trying too hard to be too much

Finna by Nino Cipri

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I don’t like it when recommendations and blurbs lie to me, or are misleading. I also don’t especially enjoy it when a story is trying so hard to make some kind of meaningful point that it repeatedly directly tells you it’s trying to make said point. Finna has so much going for it: basically a pair of queer employees, both of whom have emotional or neuro-divergent struggles, of a store that sounds suspiciously like IKEA, who very recently broke up, end up going on an […]

Horrorbore

Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

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I’m the kind of person who picks up books based entirely on the cover. If the back cover pitch does it for me, I will buy it without reading a word, based entirely on how much I like the cover art and blurb. I like to think Publishers have a certain faith in their ability to convey books to us through font and art, and I trust that if they make a cover I really dig then the book will be a-okay by me. This […]

If IKEA was built on the site of an abandoned super scary prison

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So in my profile writeup, I say that I have a hard time not finishing books.  I tried really hard to finish this book.  At first the issue was that the story was a little dark and creepy, which I love.  However, I read my Kindle books at night, and dark and creepy doesn’t really connect well with me sleeping!  This made it a little more difficult, because I had to read during lunch at work, or at a time during daylight.  I kept trying […]



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