Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The “horrible little attack weasel” gets to save the day and it’s not the hero

The Ivory Tomb by Melissa Caruso

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The Ivory Tomb is slow to start but once it gets going it’s a good adventure and solution to the problems set up in the first two volumes of the Rooks and Ruin trilogy. The first half is everyone running around trying to figure out a way to stop the demons who have all been released by the end of the second volume; then a cameo that way both fun but also not nearly as nuanced as I kind of wish given who it was […]

Come for Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace, stay for PAN (Practical Automaton Number One).

My Imaginary Mary (Mary, #2) by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton & Jodi Meadows

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Still not as good as the first Lady Janie book. A lot of this made no sense, and anachronisms were flying around willy-nilly, but I had a good time. My Imaginary Mary is what you get when you mix light fantasy (there are fairies! and Mary Godwin (Shelley) is one! (different kind of fairy than you’d expect)), alternate history (what if Mary met Ada Lovelace?), and a truly ridiculous sensibility (they invent the name Peter Pan for some reason?) with egregious unconcern for historical accuracy. […]

Two communities diverged, but come together in the woods

In the Dark by Kate Hoefler

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One of the interesting pieces of In the Dark is that it is not what it seems. And once you go farther into Kate Hoefler’s book than the cover you see that. The idea is that two voices are saying how “bad” the other is, due to their differences and the lack of knowledge by the other party. But if you watch closely, you see that things are not always dark, especially with the forest, which we are told the “witches” live. And as we […]

The can’t write 250 words for either book so combined the reviews in to one big one

Imagine a World: Full of Wonder by Heather Lean

The Art of Rewilding: The Return of Yellowstone’s Wolves by Nadja Belhadj

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The other day I was writing a review for a book and could comfortably get around 150 words to make a decent review.  I’m used to keeping my reviews under 75 words for newsletter reviews, and under 100 for a web review. I have gotten better with this 250 but some books, well a 250 worded review is more words than the book has. And while that probably is not true with the second book, it was most likely for the first one. Therefore, that […]

More than a broken heart

The Faint f Heart by Kerilynn Wilson

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Due to a few bumps in the story arc of The Faint f Heart, but particularly due to the artwork, this book is a 4.5 (rounded up to 5). This is a love story to emotions and feelings. It has realistic, science-fiction and fantasy vibes but is all too likely to happen scenario, or at least is within reason. When you play with the heart, emotions happen, and Kerilynn Wilson explores what happens when people find a way to stop feeling those emotions.   June […]

Your life hasn’t even started yet and you’re already lost?

Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi

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CBR15PASSPORT (Stamp #5: Books from different countries. Japan.) This one was an adventure for me. I don’t know a lot about Japanese literature or anime, but my kid is a Japanophile. He’s planning to minor in Japanese in college this (gulp) fall and would like to live there for a couple of years at some point (also, gulp). So, I thought of him when I saw this on the “new” bookshelf at the library and decided to give it a whirl. I asked him about it and […]



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