Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Gloriously weird

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are just as weird as I remembered.  It was also a lot of fun. I had a good memory of the basic story going in: Alice chases a talking white rabbit who is holding a pocket watch and then falls down a rabbit hole; she eats and drinks things that are suspiciously labelled and make her grow larger or smaller; and she meets a cast of weird characters (Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen, a talking caterpillar, a mad hatter). All of […]

The Alphabet is not just for learning to read

R Is for Rebel by J. Anderson Coats

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After misplacing my copy of R Is for Rebel by J. Anderson Coats, I found it again a few days ago. The nice thing is that even though I had read a good chunk of it, I remembered enough as the book is pretty easy to remember, and therefore I was able to start where I left off without too much trouble. However, since there are several characters and a few overlapping stories, I do not recommend reading it that way. This middle grade read […]

You won’t have a ghost of a chance

Séance Tea Party by Reimena Yee

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Séance Tea Party is a tale of not wanting to grow older. Of course, this theme has been done before. However, Reimena Yee’s graphic novel is a fun way to re-introduce this idea. Lora is a “late bloomer” and when she is having a séance tea party, she gets a surprise: a girl shows up. And just because she is a ghost does not stop the two of them from becoming fast friends. The trials of growing up are done in sweet, traditional graphic novel […]

Tales from the Bottom of a Winter Coat Pocket

Tales from the Folly by Ben Aaronovitch

The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch

The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch

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Sometimes you find a bunch of cough drop wrappers when you dig into pockets of coats put away for the season, and sometimes you find a twenty dollar bill. Imagine my delight when Tales from the Folly popped up on Scribd! I devoured the series earlier this year -aside from the latest; I am waiting for the paperback release- and when I saw kittenkong42’s review back in October I was PSYCHED to know that the short stories had all been collected into one place! There […]

Some big hits and major misses in an overall forgettable collection

Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane by Jonathan Oliver

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Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, edited by Jonathan Oliver, is an anthology of short stories centered around magic in all its various forms: ancient folk magic, new age witchcraft, stage magic, and even some techno-magic. There are 15 short stories in this collection, and, over all, this anthology is fine. Too often, the stories told are not short stories but rather truncated ones. For many of the stories, it feels as though the authors were limited by a page or word maximum […]

A labyrinth of isolation and connection

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Piranesi live in the House. The House is expansive and full of many mysteries. Piranesi lives, for all intents and purposes, alone though the House is occupied by one other person, The Other. What mysteries does the House hold? What lessons is the House ready to teach? And that’s all I’ll say about the plot because the less you know going in, the better. When we are all isolating and distancing from others as much as we can (at least, I hope we all are), […]



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