Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If Jack Reacher were written by Tom Clancy, but with monsters

Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry

Zero Tolerance by Jonathan Maberry

Material Witness by Jonathan Maberry

Deep, Deep Dark by Jonathan Maberry

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Joe Ledger works for the Baltimore PD, and was an Army Ranger back before 9/11 blew up the world. He’s a pretty normal dude in his mid-30s, except he’s an absolute badass who’s really good at beating people up. We’ve seen this story told a thousand times. If this was a movie in the ’80s, it’d probably star Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. If it was the ’90s, it’d probably star Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis. If it was made today….I don’t know. Maybe the […]

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Severance by Ling Ma

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This was an interesting story that I appreciated far more than I enjoyed. Candace Chen is a 20-something in middle-management at a Manhattan publishing company, in the specialty Bible division. She is good at her job, but she doesn’t really like much about it. It’s a job, it pays the bills. But she has no passion for it. But Candace, like many of her generation, doesn’t really know what it is that she actually does have passion for. She used to like photography, and had […]

Avoid the man-eating walking dead that periodically drag themselves out of a fetid lake

Broxo by Zack Giallongo

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I will start with that this review is based on a one time reading. See end for a comment on this. Broxo by Zack Giallongo is a graphic novel that from page one always felt like it was missing something. Like this was book two and not a first book. Like it was starting in the middle of a story and had already fleshed out the characters in previous books. However, from what I can tell, this was a stand-alone book that should have had […]

YA + Alternative History + Zombies!!

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

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Justina Ireland’s 2018 YA novel Dread Nation was one of New York Public Library’s Winter 2018 Picks for Young Adults. When I read the brief description about alternative history and zombies and then saw the totally badass cover over on Amazon, I had to read it. Although it clocks in at over 400 pages, I zipped through it in no time, and all I can say is that there had better be a sequel soon! Set in the 1870s, Ireland shows her readers an America […]

“It’s a cruel, cruel world. And the people are the worst part.”

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

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In Justina Ireland’s America, nobody won the Civil War. The war simply never ended, because of the shamblers. The shamblers are the dead that rose up from the battlefields of Gettysburg and began to walk, hungry for blood and flesh. The country needed to band together to fight this new threat, and the war simply petered out. Most of the cities in the South are simply gone. Burned. Destroyed. Overrun by shamblers. The cities in the North are doing slightly better, but its hard to […]

There is literally no place in American history that’ll be awesome for me.

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REVIEW OF BOTH KINDRED (Octavia E. Butler) & DREAD NATION (Justina Ireland) It was just by chance that I happened to read Dread Nation and Kindred at the same time, but it was hard not to draw parallels between the two books.  Issues of gender, power, and the complexities of race as well as strong female narrators bind the two across the vast distance of their publication dates. Both books have interesting layers, and comparing and contrasting them would make a great literary analysis essay, but […]



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