Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Page-turner mystery series alert

Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

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Fortune Favors the Dead is the first book in the “Pentecost and Parker” mystery series. If you like a little bit of Sherlock Holmes and a little bit of hard-boiled noir, this could be the series for you! The Pentecost half of the series is the (in)famous NYC private detective, Ms. Pentecost. Ms. Pentecost is a 1940s Sherlock Holmes – she is hyper-observant, obsessive, and perhaps a little uncaring of her crime-solving crew at times. She is more interested in justice than anything else. Even […]

Getting Steamy in San Francisco: #CannonBookClub2022!

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

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Fog rolling in off the Pacific! Illicit kisses in smoky clubs! Steamed buns filled with jammy pork and spices! What can I say about Last Night at the Telegraph Club that Malinda Lo didn’t already say with total confidence and care when she wrote the book? She felt as if speaking would ruin everything-then they’d have to put a name to this feeling between them, this rapidly growing heat and longing that made the sliver of air between their bodies charged with electricity. She could swear […]

Introducing your new favorite crime solving duo

Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

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Introducing Pentecost and Parker, two unconventional female detectives who couldn’t care less about playing by the rules, in their cases and in their lives. Well, here we are in 2022 and this book starts off in 1942 New York.  Willowjean, aka Will, Parker is a young woman who works in the circus as a Jill-of-all trades.  When the book opens, she’s picking up extra work doing guard duty at a construction site.  As fortune has it, she saves the life of an older woman who […]

One body holds a universe

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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  Home is a feeling. That’s a line in the beautifully written Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, a Two Spirit, Oji-Cree author. But it’s also something of a manifesto for Jonny, an indigiqueer young man whose physical body carries all the love, pain and connections to land and people in his life. Like a beautiful hermit crab, he builds a shell to protect himself from homophobia, from feeling the generations of pain in his family, from loving too much. And that same shell is bedecked with […]

A Title Both Literal and Not

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

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I saw the author post something on social media before this was released about how some early readers didn’t think the novella had enough fighting to be wuxia. Zen Cho said that was because she meant for the novella to be a fan-fic of an imaginary 50 episode tv series of that genre. I don’t really know much about wuxia but I do think that The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water has the flavor of it at least. The general premise is […]

“The planet was beautiful. The planet was horrible. The planet was full of people, and they were beautiful and horrible, too.”

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

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A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, grabbed my attention and did not let go. It was immersive, inclusive, and filled with all sorts of sentient beings with whom I was delighted to spend my time. It was not a book that I would have picked up on my own, but now I find myself barreling head-first further into the series. I was so excited to learn that it was a series; reading is the only way that I comfortably spend any “down time” […]



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