Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When Lovecraft Meets The Home Office.

The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross

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Very blatant spoilers for the previous books in the series here—be warned. Has there ever been a book that you’ve really changed your mind about on re-read? The Annihilation Score is one of these. The Annihilation Score was a Laundry Files entry that was always going to face an uphill battle; not only was the first one to pivot away for Bob’s point of view, it also dealt with a a subject that perhaps does not gel terribly well with Eldritch horrors—superheroes. I mean, trust […]

Dumb in many ways, but at least (some) characters know it

Ichi the Witch (vols. 1-2) by Osamu Nishi, Shiro Usazaki

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Ichi the Witch is, at least in the first two volumes, both generically entertaining and trope-ily generic. Clueless hero with one big talent that’s pretty handy? Check. Know-it all mentor/senior student? Check. Set up for harem comedy? Also check.  Basic premise: only women can wield magic and be witches. Ichi is a guy, a hunter who lives near a rural area, who accidentally (kind of, he intentionally interferes but…) absorbs the magic of the nearly impossible-to-defeat Uroro who is about to destroy rock-star witch Desscaras, […]

Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle

Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle

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Please note that I received this via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review. Be warned readers, this is pretty bloody/gory. A couple of scenes did turn my stomach a bit, but I kept plugging through. I won’t lie, readers are not going to like the main character, Poppy Stringer at all. At least at fast. She starts to grow on you, or at least she grew on me the more I read. And the more I read, I kept hoping that she […]

Carrion Crow by Heather Parry

Carrion Crow by Heather Parry

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Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. Trigger warning: Some body horror throughout. Wow. So Carrion Crow was a gut punch. Parry is partly inspired by the true story of Blanche Monnier and writes a fictional story following the Périgord family. I just felt pity for the character of Marguerite and absolutely loathed the character of Cécile. It was a lot of story to wade through and at times I found myself just getting impatient […]

Fairies, Feelings, and Fixing up the Old House

Thistlemarsh by Moorea Corrigan

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Thistlemarsh is supposed to be romantasy. It sort of is, but maybe I just wasn’t into this one. I didn’t really see much of any romance, just a sort of “forced to work together and suddenly we might have feelings (kinda)”? The premise is fine: Mouse, a WWI nurse, has come home to care for her brother who served a as a soldier and now has severe PTSD and/or other mental/emotional issues. She learns that basically her only surviving family, an uncle who thought his […]

“Echoes of her late husband drifted around her, this pernicious and lingering Old Gods notion that a uterus somehow endowed one with inherent childcare abilities.”

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

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No one in the town of Eternity expected widowed, middle-aged Twyla Banneker to partner with her neighbor and best friend, Frank Ellis, to join the Tanrian Marshals. But that was eight years ago, and Twyla and Frank have rewarding careers patrolling the strange land of Tanria, despite the misgivings of her grown children. Hey, it beats the alternative; the domestic grind of an empty-nester mother whose sons think she has nothing better to do than be a free babysitter. Fortunately (or unfortunately) a recent decrease […]



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