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 […]

Enter the IKEA-verse

FINNA by Nino Cipri

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“Of course Jules was alive, they had never faced a challenge whose ass they couldn’t kick, and they had the stores of righteous rage that all retail employees collected.” ― Nino Cipri, Finna “It’s okay,” Jules said. They looked….not calm, exactly, but not scared. They looked, as they had for most of their trip, thrilled that they weren’t getting misgendered while answering customers’ stupid questions about how much weight a towel rod could really hold. ― Nino Cipri, Finna Ava works at LitenVärld and she […]

Not a Whimsical Portal Fantasy, But a Corporate Retail Portal Fantasy

Finna by Nino Cipri

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Oh, there’s always been something a bit sus about that certain Swedish furniture store, hasn’t there? Just a little? About how once you go in, there’s no telling how long it’ll take you to get back out again. Whether or not it’s a new throw rug or some nice meatballs, there’s always something that keeps on trying to draw you away from the exit It’s this feeling that made me pick Finna first out of all the Hugo-nominated novellas to read, as the premise of […]

“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 […]



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