Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Queer awakenings aren’t just for teens

Cash Delgado is Living the Dream by Tehlor Kay Mejia

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I was a little hesitant to pick this book up after I couldn’t get into Sammy Espinoza, but I’m so glad I gave this a shot after all! Even though this takes place in the same town and there’s several Sammy cameos, this absolutely stands on its own with its focus on Cash and wanting to save Joyce’s, a local dive bar. This is also a book where “everything is political” really keeps coming to mind in the way it challenges gentrification and is so […]

Magical queer historical romance

Of Socialites and Prizefights by Arden Powell

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Arden Powell has been on my radar for a while and I’ve been collecting their books, but lesbians is what finally broke the seal (I am but a simple lesbian lol) and now I want to dive into the whole Flos Magicae backlist to see all the characters in their own stories. Deepa is a singer at a club and doesn’t believe in love, so when one of her paramours curses her to become a leopard every midnight and tells her the only way to […]

Fantastic Fantasy!

Faebound by Saara El-Arifi

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Saara El-Arifi immediately place herself on my auto-buy list with her debut, and this new world she’s created just confirms why I love her storytelling. The book starts with a myth telling of the three gods: Asase, the Wheat, god of the earth and creator of humans; Ewia, the two-headed Bat, god of the sun and creator of fae: and Bosome, the Water, god of the moon and creator of the elves. As far as anyone is aware, all that remains in the world are […]

Sharp-Dressed Cats, Angels, Murder, Noir that Stands Apart

Even Though I Knew the End by CL Polk

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I feel like I came to Even Though I Knew the End by CL Polk late even though it’s still a relatively new release. I also started it, had to pause because I had to read for work on deadline, and then picked up where I left off… but only after my required reading made it abundantly clear that, by comparison, this book is amazing. That said, it moved slower for me than others and perhaps that affected my overall rating for it. This is a novella that […]

An Intense Horror on Grief

Where Echoes Die by Courtney Gould

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Wow, this book… this is such a beautiful, painful story exploring grief and how not letting go, staying in the past can cause more harm than learning to move forward. Beck lost her mother only a few months ago and she and her sister are on their way to Texas to live with their dad, but first Beck has to find out the truth of Backravel, the place that her mother was investigating, the place that basically stole her mother from her. But things in […]

Twitter Win Fizzles

This is How You Lost the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

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Twitter was kind of saved from doom recently by a guy loudly and proudly promoting his favorite new book, and encouraging others to do the same. I approve of this behavior. I was with Bigolas Dickolas (a Monty Python reference, I hope) in his enthusiasm for about the first half of This is How You Lose the Time War, but then it lost me. The problem for me is that there is not enough world and character building to hold interest and keep the story […]



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