Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About kittenkong42

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SF and fantasy fiction fan. Lost my dad and sister to cancer so want to support this cause

kittenkong42's Reviews:

Robots, monsters, and medieval, chinese culture

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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I first encountered Xiran Jay Zhao via twitter when friends linked to her takedown of the 2020 Mulan film (well worth watching – the takedown, not the movie) so when I read that she was writing a novel that built on Medieval Chinese concepts with giant robots and monsters/kaiju I was obviously going to read it. In Iron Widow we see a patriarchal society in which women are very much second class citizens. For most it’s marriage and hope you get a good husband. And […]

Pieces of Silver: A return to the Folly

Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch

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Amongst Our Weapons is the 9th full length novel in the Rivers of London series and as per usual is definitely not the place to start if you haven’t read any of the books yet. (If you haven’t they are very good so head back to book 1 and pick it up!). And if you’re wondering why I’ve titled this review Pieces of Silver it’s because I won of the 100 celebratory coins minted for the publication of this book 🙂 We are once again […]

Revisiting Midkemia

Magician by Raymond E Feist

Silverthorn by Raymond E Feist

A Darkness at Sethanon by Raymond E Feist

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It’s been a strange year, I actually started it reading at pace but then lost my inspiration for writing about what I’d read. Going to try and make up for that now by reviewing my trip back to Midkemia! Raymond Feist’s fantasy world, based on the D&D game he and friends played, is always a solid read. It’s a richly detailed fantasy epic comprising inter-related shorter series and actually came to a conclusion in Magician’s End many years after the first books. I’ve revisited the […]

A return to the old kingdom

Terciel & Elinor by Garth Nix

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Way back in 1995 Garth Nix created an intriguing world with his book Sabriel. A world in which a kingdom of magic was separated from a more mundane land (Ancelstierre) that felt like 1930’s England, and in that magic kingdom necromancers raised the dead and risked the world to bring back an ancient evil. Fighting against this were the Abhorsen, a family of good necromancers whose job it was to return the undead to the afterlife. It was a great and rich world that was […]

AI: Not scary in the way you think

You look like a thing and I love you by Janelle Shane

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You say AI and people immediately start thinking about Skynet, The Matrix, or HAL 9000. We have been programmed by decades of literature and film to associate the concept of AI with human like intelligence and thought processes that sees these creations go rogue and decide to “kill all humans”. Probably Boston Dynamics scary dancing robots and “dogs” are not helping here either! But as this book shows the reality is closer to the kind of decisions made in “I Robot” where a decision is […]

Magical Teenager – just a bit more contemporary than Harry

What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

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This new novella in the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch covers events that happened in summer 2013 when his primary protagonist Peter Grant was off solving the case of a missing child in Herefordshire (The Hanging Tree). During that summer we follow Peter’s cousin Abigail Kamara in London as teenagers go missing around Hampstead Heath and then turn up later missing their memories. At this point Abigail is still not formally attached to “The Folly”, but she has already been exposed to the […]



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