Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Why look after the soul of a thing if you’ve trained it to believe it has no soul?”

Activation Degradation by Marina J. Lostetter

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Oh, hello, blurb that barely scratches the surface of this book. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting in to with this book, but it was exactly what I needed right now. At its heart, it’s a book about found family, about finding the people who love you even when you mess up, who love you for who you are and not what you can do for them. “It had a job to do. It wanted to do its job. It wanted to pilot […]

Still not entirely sure what is going on in this story, but it’s an intriguing set-up

Paper Girls, vol 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

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3.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Gateway It’s just after Halloween 1988, and four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls have a very unusual night, full of surprises, peril, and unexpected occurrences. I went into Paper Girls knowing literally nothing about it except that it was written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang, both artists whose work I’ve liked in the past. Did I know it was set in the late 1980s? Nope. Did I know the protagonists were pre-teens? Big old no. Had I given […]

First it was spiders, then it was octopuses, now it’s . . . everything. Just wait for the bits with the rats.

The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Adrian Tchaikovsky is obsessed with non-human, non-alien sentience. This book was not what I expected, and yet, makes perfect sense in retrospect. A lot of very similar themes to the Children of Time books. This one didn’t quite fire up my imagination the way the Children of Time books did, but I quite enjoyed it! So, not space opera (like I thought? for some reason???) but multiverse. But, a very unique take on the multiverse. The book starts on a more intimate level, with two […]

A mystery on the moon.

The Relentless Moon (Lady Astronaut, #3) by Mary Robinette Kowal

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This is my favorite of these books so far, but I will admit that there is just something about Kowal’s writing that doesn’t perfectly gel with my tastes. I’m curious enough to keep going to see how this series turns out, but I may need to rethink reading any more of her books (I also was pretty unenthused about the first book in her fantasy-Austen-pastiche series). We switch narrators from Elma York (who is on her way to Mars during the course of this book) […]

Not a great collection of stories, in my opinion.

A Universe of Wishes by ed. Dhonielle Clayton

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This was a pretty disappointing collection. I only enjoyed a handful of stories. I think the thing that frustrates me the most about YA fantasy and sf recently is that these are the genres of the imagination, and yet so many authors keep telling the same old stories, even, as it turns out, when those stories are populated by a diverse cast of characters, featuring characters of many races, genders, and sexualities. Some of these stories were dull and uninspired, some I thought were just […]

“If we want something, we have to push back against everything around us and take it by force.”

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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Look, I am always down for demolishing the patriarchy with mecha. Maybe it’s my fierce dedication to Gundam Wing as a teen, but I have a deep and abiding love for mecha and especially female pilots, so of course I was anticipating this. And it’s exactly what it bills itself as – a fierce and brutal takedown of the patriarchy. In this version of China, the Great Wall protects Huaxia from the Hunduns, strange alien lifeforms that, once killed, can be transformed into Chrysalises, mecha that […]



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