Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Little demons everywhere

Unsung Heroine by Sarah Kuhn

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Official book description: Lucy Valdez is many things: fight trainer/bodyguard to superheroines, fabulous vintage fashion plate, undisputed karaoke queen at local joint, The Gutter. She is also one of the toughest fighters in all of San Francisco without superpowers. So why can’t she seem to confess her feelings to her longtime crush Rose Rorick, head of the San Francisco Police Department’s Demon Unit? Well…. actually, she knows why. She’s afraid Rose won’t like the real Lucy, the Lucy underneath all the fabulous bravado. (She is […]

Wanting to go back down the rabbit hole

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

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It’s official: Seanan McGuire is my new favorite. After really enjoying Sparrow Road and then realizing I’d have to wait a near-eternity (or maybe it just seems like it) to get the sequel from the library, I found on the shelves Every Heart A Doorway, first in another series (Wayward Children) by the same author. The basic premise is intriguing: what happens to the people who find their way into fairy tale worlds (like Alice in Wonderland etc) but then end up back in their […]

A Valentine’s Delight

A Big Surprise for Valentine's Day (Holidays with the Wongs #4) by Jackie Lau

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In recent months Jackie Lau has jumped to the “read right away” position as her novellas in the Holidays with the Wongs series has been released. While I didn’t get an ARC this time, I have signed up to be considered in future. A Big Surprise for Valentine’s Day makes me feel that was a very good choice. Picking up after the events of A Match Made for Thanksgiving and A Second Chance Road Trip for Christmas and running concurrently with A Fake Girlfriend for […]

The fridged women speak.

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

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The Refrigerator Monologues is a feminist response to the way women are treated in superhero comics. It’s a short read, a novella really, at only 147 pages, but it packs a punch. Riffing on both the stage play The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, and Gail Simone’s website Women in Refrigerators (which coined the term “fridging” for any female character who dies in order to further the plotline or character arc of a man), Valente’s book features six women whose lives were reduced to subplots […]

Lau writes characters you care about – and that’s a really good thing.

A Fake Girlfriend for Chinese New Year (Holidays with the Wongs #3) by Jackie Lau

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I continue to love the conceit of these novellas; there are four Wong children, all unattached, and their parents and grandparents hatch a plan to set them up with potential partners at Canadian Thanksgiving based on the tropes in the romance novels that their mother and grandmother read. The initial matches go terribly, but as the holidays progress each Wong sibling finds love in different romantic tropey ways. For A Fake Girlfriend for Chinese New Year Lau combined the friends to lovers and fake relationship […]

Really made me crave some butter chicken

Tikka Chance on Me by Suleikha Snyder

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4.5 stars This novella was exactly what I needed in the stressful weeks starting the new year, when I’m massively behind on my work (thanks, ill-timed Christmas illness), still fighting a horrible cough and cold (at this stage, I’m not entirely sure I’m not suffering from a new cold that I caught on the heels of the first one). I have so many mediocre English essays left to grade, with the deadline of the 12th of January (when all the grades for term 1 have […]



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