Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The whole place had the look of a picked-at-body. But damn! What a beautiful corpse.”

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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This book has received so much hype and lived up to every bit of praise it has received!  Thank you, Cannonballers for putting this on my radar and keeping it there.  I’m almost at a loss to review Gideon the Ninth since so many of y’all have done so already.  Here is a list of things that I enjoyed immensely, in no particular order: 1 – Muir’s word choices.  It’s delightful to be confronted with an unfamiliar word and Muir did it more in this […]

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Dune (Dune, #1) by Frank Herbert

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I probably should have continued on with this series sometime between now and first reading Dune about eleven or twelve years ago. There are elements here which I would have much more easily glossed over in years past, but which stick out terribly now. Still, I feel you have to read a book within the context of its time. I can much more easily overlook or ignore some of the stuff in here since it’s fifty-six years old at this point than I could in […]

When a Bot has feelings

Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson

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Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson is a hard book to explain.  Partly because it defies genre and partly because it isn’t really about what it appears to be about.  Let’s start with the genre, my library copy had three stickers on the spine – Science Fiction, Humor, and Social Issues.  Besides these categories, it is written in an interesting style with regular prose sections and then sections written as if part of a screenplay.  Moving on to the plot, it may appear […]

Mercenary librarians with hearts of gold

Deal with the Devil by Kit Rocha

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When I read the premise for Kit Rocha’s Deal with the Devil, I immediately knew I would love it. Nina is an information broker with a mission–she and her team of mercenary librarians use their knowledge to save the hopeless in a crumbling America. Knox is the bitter, battle-weary captain of the Silver Devils. His squad of supersoldiers went AWOL to avoid slaughtering innocents, and now he’s fighting to survive. They’re on a deadly collision course and the passion that flares between them only makes […]

Classic space opera with sexy times

Polaris Rising by Jessie Mihalik

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Polaris Rising came on my radar thanks to Instagram Cannonballer Lanezabel recommending it.  I put it on my suggestion list for the Cannonball book exchange and special thank you to Bothari43 for gifting it! Polaris Rising has a classic space opera set up, three powerful ruling houses over see the Royal Consortium.  Each house is always on the hunt for ways to exploit the others and gain greater control of the galaxy.  House members are used as political pieces and accorded extraordinary protections due to the […]

A world-building amuse-bouche

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

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This is a delightful amuse-bouche of a book! I haven’t really read novellas before, but I really enjoyed how Nnedi Okorafor sketched a fascinating ‘working’ world (well, universe) in just a few pages. The brushstrokes created a lovely, multisensorial universe and a few interesting characters that I assume are more fleshed out in other works. Texture and smell and color and sensation were all integral to the story. Binti, the heroine, comes from an isolated desert community, and, at 16, she runs away from home […]



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