Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Echo Wife: Come for the thriller, stay for the ethical quandaries

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

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I came to this novel for a domestic thriller, and I left with thoughts about science, ethics, and the nature of humanity and personhood.  Evelyn is a world-renowned scientist known for her work with clones. She’s developed a process by which you can have a fully developed adult quote cumin within about a little over three months. She’s kind of a big deal – winning awards and making waves in the scientific communities.  Personally, her life is a bit of a mess. She’s estranged from […]

A book I asked, “Why that was there?” (A lot.) But learned as I read.

When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey

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When I first looked at When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey, I immediately put it down again. I was not in the mood for witches, teen girl drama or magic. But when I found it sometime later, I thought, oh why not? Not like I had to finish. Yet, I would go onto finish, even with misgivings. There is a slow beginning to this teen novel. In fact, the whole pace of the story can be slow with a rushed and mostly incomplete, unsatisfying […]

Lord save me from a sad sack narrator.

Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey

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The premise here is: What if your sibling went to magic school and you’re a muggle? And what if you’re a private detective hired to solve a murder at a magic school? Both of these are intriguing separately. Together, I could not resist this book. Unfortunately, I did not like it nearly as much as I wanted to. Parts of it were stellar, and parts of it absolutely did not work for me. Our narrator is Ivy Gamble, a struggling private detective whose twin sister […]

Damn the Man

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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I listened to Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars last year and enjoyed it, but this was even better. Upright Women Wanted is set in a Wild West style world from the future, where a continuous war has torn the country apart and men dominate society. Information, the tool we use to grow and learn and resist, is tightly controlled with approved materials from the Librarians. The goal for this society is to keep people uneducated and very carefully educated. At the start of the story, […]

cbr12bingo – Green (and another Bingo!)

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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I wanted so much more from this little dusty sketch of the dystopian west. It had a helluva hook – outlaw lesbians! Gun-slinging sisters-in-resistance! Non-binary action heroes! Unfortunately, it ground to a halt far short of its potential destination. It begins as all westerns do: someone hanging taut at the end of a rope. There are western tropes a-plenty; rough-riding, chaw-spitting, howdy pardnering, thankya kindly ma’ams litter the landscape. This wild west is wild for a different reason, though: we’re in a thinly plotted dystopia. […]

“She didn’t know how to get it—but she had a feeling that if she stuck with the Librarians for long enough, she might be able to figure it out. How to feast instead of starving. How to like the person who she was instead of fighting it.”

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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Upright Women Wanted was one of the books I was most looking forward to in 2020. This is my first Sarah Gailey, I know them from Twitter and I’ve clocked the reviews here of their books. But the description of Upright Women Wanted caught my attention and plunked itself on my to read list. Alas, I wanted to love this book but instead I just really liked it. Its good, its comfortably three stars good but the idea and themes deserve four. Unfortunately the beginning […]



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