Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Murder at the Opera and maybe a few other places too

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

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The Witness for the Dead almost feels like The Goblin Emperor was written more as a prequel, and not as something of a branch off sequel. The character Thara Celehar is not a major presence in the initial novel, but he’s got a full personality and sense of self and history in the follow-up novella. My only real complaint is that it feels kind of like you need to have recently read the first novel or have a pretty good memory of some of the […]

A Psalm for my Inner Perfectionist

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

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I discovered to my horror while reading an arc for Monk and Robot #2, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, that I never finished my review of A Psalm for the the Wild Built. I’m also not surprised, because my love for it overwhelms me into a flailing state of indecipherable babbling and crying. There are some novellas that are like the Tardis, so much bigger than you think they could possibly be. I’ve listened to A Psalm for the Wild-Built three times now, and I […]

“I never stopped trying to save you, so don’t you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.”

A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1) by Alix E. Harrow

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A Spindle Splintered is a queer retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, playing on the variations that exist and adding one of its own. The basic story has been around for almost seven hundred years and has flown through the hands of Basile, Perrault, and Grimm, and that’s before we get into the hundreds of adaptations so what’s another? Harrow brings her own lens to this, and imbues her lead, Zinnia Grey, with a wonderfully clear voice. It is so realistic that I initially thought […]

the frogman cometh

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

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You know how sometimes, when you are doing housework to distract yourself from your crumbling marriage, a 6’11” Frogman named Larry escapes from a scientific institute and comes to your house for good food and better sex? No? Well, I suppose it isn’t an every day situation for all, but it’s certainly Dorothy’s new normal! “but Cait, isn’t this just The Shape of Water?” NOPE! It predates TSOW, having been first published in 1982, and not all aquatic lovers are created equally! While it is impossible to […]

Snow on a cover makes me emotionally nervous

Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt

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Orbiting Jupiter This was a short novel, bordering on novella. I don’t know where it was recommended to me but I know that any book with a cover in winter is almost certainly going to be sad so I was at least somewhat prepared. The book is from the perspective of a young boy, Jack, whose family brings in a foster kid, Joseph. Joseph is 14 and was placed in foster care after a violent and drug induced incident with a teacher. Joseph also has […]

Old Magic, Old Story Style

Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories by Diana Wynne Jones

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One of the things I always find fascinating about reading short story collections by authors who’ve had a very long career is to see the growth and change of their style over time. Unexpected Magic by Diana Wynne Jones is no exception. The collection has stories published from throughout her career, from as early as the 1960s to the early 2000s. Not in any particular order, the stories range from speculative tales of authors so lost in their work it becomes real to cats telling their […]



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