Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This was their time to be really f’ing weird.

Breaking Badger by Shelly Laurenston

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Shelly Laurenston’s Honey Badger Chronicles have joined Martha Wells’ the Murderbot Diaries and Becky Chamber’s Wayfarers series as the books I shove in everyone’s faces given the slightest opening. Are they even romances anymore? I don’t know. Who cares? They have transcended genre and reason and exist on their own plane. There are always 30 something characters and 56 plots going on in a Honey Badger book and it feels a bit like the Motown Wall of Sound. Either you can’t take the confusion or […]

Horizon (2009) and Knife Children (2019) by Lois McMaster Bujold

Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

Knife Children by Lois McMaster Bujold

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I put this one off for awhile (I originally planned to read all four of these books together and without stopping). There’s something a little exhausting on taking on a series of novels, fantasy of otherwise, when they’re designed to be read as one long narrative as opposed to four distinct entries. But I am glad I waited so I could catch my breath, and it turns out that this was both the best of the four books, but also a satisfying ending. What’s remarkable […]

Lots of Feelings Actually Works Out For Once

We Free the Stars by Hafsah Faizal

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We Free the Stars is one of those sequels with which you really should do a re-read of the first book (We Hunt the Flame in this case) right before you pick up the second. There were a lot of characters brought back or brought up that I didn’t remember well from the first novel, and it took me a while to remember the details that would have helped their reappearance make more sense. We Free the Stars is a direct sequel that picks up […]

“She didn’t want mercy. She wanted them to burn.”

The Unbroken by C.L. Clark

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I wanted this book because of the cover, because, holy crap look at that woman’s arms. I’m shallow, OK? But yes, while Touraine is incredibly hot, this is also an intense and unflinching look at colonialism and belonging. Touraine was conscripted as a child of five into the Balladairan legions from conquered Qazāl, derogatorily called the Sands. All traces of her life before were beaten out of her – the language, the culture, her own name. By contrast, Luca is the Balladairan princess, used to […]

Lord save me from a sad sack narrator.

Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey

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The premise here is: What if your sibling went to magic school and you’re a muggle? And what if you’re a private detective hired to solve a murder at a magic school? Both of these are intriguing separately. Together, I could not resist this book. Unfortunately, I did not like it nearly as much as I wanted to. Parts of it were stellar, and parts of it absolutely did not work for me. Our narrator is Ivy Gamble, a struggling private detective whose twin sister […]

“We are the farting children of Heaven, blessed be our slippery viscera”

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman

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Series: Tess of the Road is the first in a series, but it’s a companion series to Seraphina and Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman. I first read Seraphina in March of 2018 and Shadow Scale in June of 2018 (and reread them both in 2020). I love these books, and I’ve been putting off reading Tess of the Road both to extend the pleasure of anticipation and also out of fear that it wouldn’t measure up. What I remembered about this series prior to reading […]



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