Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Oh Look—It’s a Payoff!

Be the Serpent by Seanan McGuire

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Same disclaimer as per usual; if you are reading a review of a long-running series—and Be the Serpent is entry number 16—you know what to expect spoiler-wise. I’ll try not to mention too much in this book, but the others are all fair game.  Another thing with long running book series is that there is a lot of potential for very long plot arcs. While most books in the October Daye series have a little surprise or two, there was something set up in A […]

The Suffering

The Suffering by Rin Chupeco

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The second book in “The Girl from the Well” series was solid. I think the end dragged a bit and honestly the ending didn’t really work for me. I think I would have preferred if Chupeco had gone another way. Once we read about one ritual that a strong priest or priestess could do, I kind of saw the ending coming a mile away. That said I loved the overall plot of Tark and Okiku returning to Japan to save Kagura well as fight against […]

Problems of a Family of Psychics

Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory

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I discovered this book in a roundabout way. When I was reviewing a short story collection, I ran across a story I really liked and wondered what else the writer had done. I was pleasantly surprised to find Mr. Gregory had several novels, so I ordered Spoonbenders (recommended by several readers). It’s strange, wonderful, gritty, and a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The Telemachus family is highly unusual. They’re psychics but not very good ones. Teddy, the dad, isn’t psychic, but he is the greatest card-playing shyster […]

Science Fantasy at Its Best

The Moonday Letters by Emmi Itaranta

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I was in a weeklong writing class recently where they interviewed various authors. One of the more interesting  was Emmi Itaranta, a Finnish author, and I ordered her latest book, The Moonday Letters, after hearing her discuss her process. She writes in Finnish and English simultaneously as she had beta readers in both languages. I can’t imagine writing in two languages at the same time. Writing in one is difficult enough. The Letters are an interesting format: epistolary. The protagonist writes unsent letters to her […]

Melmoth

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

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So this was a 3.5 star read that I rounded up to 4 stars. I didn’t care for the Essex Serpent at all and worried I wouldn’t like this book, but I thought Perry did a good job with this. She took her own spin on Melmoth the Wanderer Novel by Charles Maturin. Just like with that book, Perry pushes the Gothic elements all the while telling several stories within the main story. I thought the writing for the most part was spot-on. I loved […]

Doesn’t it suck when you’re dead?

Undeaded by Eliott Ventadour

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The publisher description of  Undeaded by Eliott Ventadour says it all: After being declared clinically dead, traveling salesman Ed Zamsa tries to go on with his life regardless of his strange condition. As if things weren’t hard enough without being dead. Therefore, all I will say this book is WARPED and it is BIZARRE, and it is NOT safe for work. It has language, sex, murder, and mayhem. There is an offbeat sense of humor not everyone will appreciate or get. Even if some of […]



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