Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Come for Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace, stay for PAN (Practical Automaton Number One).

My Imaginary Mary (Mary, #2) by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton & Jodi Meadows

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Still not as good as the first Lady Janie book. A lot of this made no sense, and anachronisms were flying around willy-nilly, but I had a good time. My Imaginary Mary is what you get when you mix light fantasy (there are fairies! and Mary Godwin (Shelley) is one! (different kind of fairy than you’d expect)), alternate history (what if Mary met Ada Lovelace?), and a truly ridiculous sensibility (they invent the name Peter Pan for some reason?) with egregious unconcern for historical accuracy. […]

Wow, what a bummer.

The Night Ship by Jess Kidd

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It’s actually pretty impressive how this book could take super interesting subject matter and make it this dull. This book did absolutely nothing for me, except make me wish it was over. I can’t entirely pinpoint why, so I’m chalking it up to disliking the style it was written in, but there were also some baked-in flaws that could have made it better for me. This is a dual-timeline story, one in 1628 following a young Dutch girl whose mother has just died, who is […]

“This is the year where if you are not careful, you could stand to lose it all. There will be one pregnancy, one funeral, and one marriage. A complete turn around the sun by the next Lunar year. But you must fix your relationship with everyone. And I mean everyone in your family. Starting with your daughters.”

The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh

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This was a fun one. The author has said in interviews that she wanted to portray the complexities of Vietnamese American/diaspora relationships between women, and she wanted the women to be messy and make mistakes and have a really hard time not making the same mistakes again and again. So she wrote about a family of cursed Vietnamese women! From the blurb: “Everyone in Orange County’s Little Saigon knew that the Duong sisters were cursed. It started with their ancestor, Oanh, who dared to leave […]

CBR15 Passport! Book #1 – A book that is Not For Moi.

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

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Oof, this was not for me. Like, so not for me that I maybe shouldn’t even be writing a review, because my brain just bounced off this after about ten pages and then just kept bouncing harder and harder. This is a speculative fiction, experimental novel by British poet Salena Godden about an anthropomorphized version of Death (here called Mrs. Death, personified by an older Black woman) and her connections to/conversations with a person called Wolf. In addition to the the prose actually feeling like […]

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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I will admit that I have been avoiding this book since it was published, but especially after I read a Sherlock fanfic one time* that was a riff on Life After Life, and which is one of the most emotionally traumatizing fics I’ve ever read, so by association I was pre-traumatized by this book. Also, one time I read the first Jackson Brodie mystery and I thought it was boring, so I thought this would be boring too. Happily, wrong on all fronts! *If you […]

“They were supposed to grow up with their hands in each other’s pockets, compensating for one another’s weaknesses, encouraging one another’s strengths.”

Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1) by Seanan McGuire

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This was my first Seanan McGuire book, which is a little unbelievable, both because she writes in genres I love, and because she writes so very prolifically. And I started with a really good one. I’m not against spoilers and frequently spoil myself for things, but I went into this book almost completely unspoiled, even for the premise, and I think that’s the way to go. The book is so weird it’s almost impossible to really sum up in a blurb anyway. So, how to […]



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