Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“What an entirely haunted time to be alive.”

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Nona has the best life ever. Sure, she lives on a war-torn hellscape of a planet with a malevolent blue sphere hovering in the sky. And okay, she can’t remember anything further back than 6 months ago. And also, it sure seems like she’s some kind of inhuman, immortal entity somehow inhabiting the body of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. But Nona has a family that loves her. She has a group of friends to explore abandoned buildings with. Sometimes, she even gets to pet a 6-legged dog […]

“I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge”

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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This review has been a long time in coming. I borrowed Harrow the Ninth on Libby back in February and made it 60 percent of the way through before the app stole it back (one advantage of physical books is that you can keep them way past their due date and just pay them back later, instead of the library yoinking them away through your phone). After two and a half agonizing months on the waiting list, I finally got it back last week and […]

“I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it”

Gideon the 9th by Tamsyn Muir

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Gideon, tired disaster gay of the Ninth House, just wants to leave. Tired of the creepy nuns, the oppressive tomb that’s considered living quarters and the promise that upon death her skeleton will continue to be press-ganged into serving the Ninth House, she packs her clothes and her dirty magazines and attempts to hit the spaceport. Only Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, won’t let her go. See, the Emperor of the Universe has summoned the heirs of all […]

Less Well Known Works by Two of My Auto-Buy Authors

The Six Deaths of the Saint by Alix E. Harrow

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir

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Alix E. Harrow is one of my favorite authors, so as part of my quest to read just about everything she’s written, I dove into her short story The Six Deaths of the Saint. It was unexpected and intense and emotional, though it’s hard to share much without getting into spoiler territory. It also contains a mix of 1st and 2nd person perspective. The story starts with the Saint of War showing up to a poor, nameless orphan and the Saint helps her become a […]

A Much-Wanted Dialectic

The Unwanted Guest by Tamsyn Muir

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Hah, Ok I thought maybe doing this short story was a little bit cheeky.  But then I saw that fellow Cannonballer Monty had beaten me to the punch! All the permission I needed. In physical sense, The Unwanted Guest was initially a little tricky for me to track down and read because I have so far only seen it in the paperback copies of Nona the Ninth. I wasn’t going to buy a paperback version, as I have already purchased two copies of the book […]

Yeah, definitely going to need a 2nd read

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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CBR16 BINGO: Part 2, for the second book in the Locked Tomb series I look back fondly on the days when, in my innocence, I thought Gideon the Ninth was a complicated novel. I read that book twice, thank goodness, because if I hadn’t, I would have either been even more confused by Harrow the Ninth, or I’d have shrugged off details that didn’t make sense thinking I was simply misremembering them. After finishing Harrow the Ninth, I am spent. I’m as weak and cowed […]



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