Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About lowercasesee

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I've been told I have a reading problem. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: lowercasesee's Quick Questions interview.)

lowercasesee's Reviews:

A familiar but not unwelcome story

Honor Among Thieves by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre

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While I waited for my hold to come up on the finale of Rachel Caine’s The Great Library series, I dipped my toe into Honor Among Thieves. I am glad she chose to co-write this with another author because I very quickly saw a lot of similar themes from TGL and was relieved not to be reading an author’s remix of her own books, even if I like those other books. Honor Among Thieves is different enough to keep me interested and is yet another series I will […]

Whoops for last year’s books

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

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I think this may be the second Cannonball I’ve kicked off with a Liane Moriarty book. I’d prefer not to make a habit of it. Ah well. For me, her books have become kind of a “if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.” This particular flavor was better than What Alice Forgot but not as good as Big Little Lies. Impossible to put down, of course, but that doesn’t necessarily mean worth reading. This one gives us a slight variation on her unreliable narrator in […]

The contemporary voice worked for me

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Like most of us, all I knew about Gideon the Ninth going into it was “lesbian necromancers in space” and yeah, that’s not a bad four-word description. It’s accurate but it still doesn’t fully capture the book. Gideon manages complex characters, way too many names, and an anachronistic voice that works where it really shouldn’t. I’ve already put myself in line for the sequel and it isn’t even released until next June. A lot of world building went into this one. Effectively there are nine houses representing nine […]

A perfect storm of human greed and opportunity

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

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After the fact, I described this book to my sister as “The whole book, from a certain perspective, is full indictment of modern capitalism” (at the time I was hung up on the single sentence anecdote that a billionaire investor shrugged off his $100 million loss as a tax write off, so I was in full EAT THE RICH mode). The summation, while slightly cavalier, is also not wrong. Unfettered, unregulated capitalism is what allowed Theranos to thrive for nearly a decade, bilking hundreds of millions […]

YA author makes a solid transition to full A

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

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I am a sucker for books that take aim a privilege, even in such a fantastical way. Our main character, Alex, is an underdog lifted out of a drug den in California and transplanted into the hallowed halls of Yale so of course the bad guys are the privileged white dudes (and occasional lady). Even if they aren’t the specific overall bad buy, they’re all exposed to like really super suck in some way or another. Reading this book came with a nice side of schadenfreude. […]



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