Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Only living here wasn’t exactly turning out to be normal.”

Night of the Living Queers by Shelly Page and Alex Brown

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In honor of Pride month (well, actually, Overdrive selected it for me because it was available, and, fortuitously, it fits the theme!), I picked up Night of the Living Queers, edited by Shelly Page and Alex Brown. This YA short story collection, which is unfortunately named, in my opinion, was terrific. As with any short story collection, there were a few stories that didn’t work so well for me, but as a collection, writing quality was uniformly high, the variety was delicious in terms of […]

Tennal the Chaos needs more Motivation

Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell

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I really liked Everina Maxwell’s debut Winter’s Orbit, so I made sure to get Ocean’s Echo as soon as it came out. I saved it for June as school is out and also Pride month. Ocean’s Echo is not a direct sequel which is sort of too bad but fine since I already knew that, but it’s definitely got some parallels. Basically an order vs chaos pair are forced together and must work through their personal and public problems; this worked out quite well the […]

No One to Really Root For but It’s Still Somehow Pretty Good

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

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She Who Became the Sun definitely lived up to the hype; the characters are interesting and complex, and there is plenty of action and plot. What bothered me was that there was really only one character who stood up for general human decency, not just “I must take charge of my destiny no matter what I have to do (including murdering innocent people and not so innocent people)”. The basic premise is pretty well known already: in a quasi historical early medieval China, a nameless […]

Truth, Justice and a Better World

Superman Son of Kal-El Vol. 1: The Truth by Tom Taylor, John Timms

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A couple of weeks ago, I got a surprise delivery — a book I had ordered back in January and completely forgotten about. And it took me a minute to remember why I had ordered it. I do enjoy comics/graphic novels, but usually Superman is not one of my “must reads.” But last year DC Comics introduced a new iteration of Clark Kent’s son Jon and people lost their minds. Jonathan Kent is not just the new Superman, he is also bisexual. Moreover, Jon is […]

Support your local drag queens!

50 Drag Queens Who Changed the World by Dan Jones

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Happy Pride, everyone! Dan Jones attempts to document the 50 most important drag queens who have changed the world. For each queen, he writes a couple of paragraphs about their accomplishments and impact on the world and there’s a cute illustration from Michele Rosenthal of each performer. This is admittedly a herculean undertaking, and Jones gives it a good go. On the whole, he does fine. There seems to be a concerted effort to not just include contestants from RuPaul’s Drag Race on this list which […]

Get out of that haus, man!

Bath Haus by P.J. Vernon

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BookPage recommended this book a few months ago, either in the Pride issue or shortly before. Either way, I read this thriller based on their recommendation. This book is wild. Oliver has what seems to be an idyllic life in the Washington, D.C. area. He’s married to a doctor, he lives in amazing landmark of a home – things are going pretty well. However, this is a thriller, so of course things aren’t really going that well. Oliver is bored in his perfect life, so […]



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