Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Mythic Alphabet Murders and Staying Normal

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix

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Bingo 2: Part 2 I’m going a tad bit literal here as The Sinister Booksellers of Bath is a sequel. Once again, it’s in 1980s London, Bath, and nearby areas, with some excursions into locations/times folkloric or supernatural. Susan, Merlin, Vivien, and the rest of the booksellers and associates are all back as well. There are essentially two mysteries on hand, both involving Susan: there’s the disappearances and murders in a realm out of time and sort of space, and then there’s Susan’s growing sense […]

“Only living here wasn’t exactly turning out to be normal.”

Night of the Living Queers by Shelly Page and Alex Brown

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In honor of Pride month (well, actually, Overdrive selected it for me because it was available, and, fortuitously, it fits the theme!), I picked up Night of the Living Queers, edited by Shelly Page and Alex Brown. This YA short story collection, which is unfortunately named, in my opinion, was terrific. As with any short story collection, there were a few stories that didn’t work so well for me, but as a collection, writing quality was uniformly high, the variety was delicious in terms of […]

Rage Against the Machine

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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This review contains some mild spoilers which I think are given away in the book jacket. Iron Widow is a YA story set in a future city of Chinese inspired Huaxia where men and women pilot mecha type suits to protect the population from aliens around the Great Wall. The suits are called Chrysalises, and the pilot, a man, teams up with a woman in the back in a merging of energy and minds that usually result in the woman’s death. This is how the […]

Please stop running and do something

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

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This book was recommended to me by a friend, who doesn’t usually share my taste in books, but I decided to read it anyway and was kind of disappointed. The Marrow Thieves is dystopian, so I expected it to be right up my alley, but when I read it I was surprised. It’s set at an undefined time in the future where everyone except the Native people have lost the ability to dream. Their ability to dream is stored in their bone marrow so the […]

I was probably the target audience for this book when it was written, 25 years ago. But I still love it today.

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

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“Your words are kindling, twigs covered in wax, soaked in lamp oil, sticky with tar. Your breath is a match, scratching along sandpaper… Whisper break the silence, one word, then two…with every word spoken a loud victory. The words burst into flames, the silence, broken.” This imagery from the novel’s foreward was so powerful and poetic, and the story hadn’t even started yet! But what a great story it is, and beautifully told – even though one doesn’t think of freshman year of high school […]

It only took me a year to review this

Dry by Jarod and Neal Shusterman

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This book was first recommended to me by a librarian and then by my brother, so I read it in December 2022, enjoyed it, started to review it, and never got around to finishing the review. Now I reread it in December 2023 and finally finished my review. It only took me a year! Dry by Neal Shusterman is a dystopian thriller set in California during a massive drought called the “Tap-Out” where there is no running water. People are fighting over water and resources, […]



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