Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Absolutely and wonderfully bonkers read

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Bolstered by all the delightful comments on my Gideon the Ninth review, I thought I should try to put my thoughts together about Harrow the Ninth, the sequel. SPOILERS FOR GIDEON THE NINTH FOLLOW! Really. It’s impossible to talk about Harrow without talking about the end of Gideon. It doesn’t just follow chronologically (sort of), but the impact of the ending on Harrow informs the entirety of her story. So… wow. I am so impressed by author Tamsyn Muir, who took her sure-fire hit–where one of the main things […]

“War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”

The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1) by R.F. Kuang

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It’s super gross that this book was written by a nineteen year old on her gap year. I thought it was good before I learned that’s how old she was when she wrote it but now I’m straight up sickened. I’m just thinking about the kind of shit I was up to when I was nineteen, and it was basically attending classes, going to marching band practice, afternoon naps in my dorm, and eating infinity burritos from the burrito cart. Kuang was basically like, Oh, […]

This was fine, but the satire didn’t really resonate for me.

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

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Everybody raves about Patrick Ness, but this is my first experience with his books. He seems like a talented writer. His prose was well-executed. He knows his way around story and character arcs. And he seems very imaginative and inventive. I even read this book pretty fast, and while reading, I wasn’t ever wishing I was reading something else. But . . . I just didn’t click with it. And the parts I did click with were sort of undercut by the ending. It was […]

A lovely escape from the real world

Reflections (Indexing #2) by Seanan McGuire

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I’ve been struggling to read much this year, particularly as I’d been picking quite weighty books to plough through, so I decided it was time for some brain candy. I’ve been loving Seanan McGuire for a while now, so while waiting to get my hands on more of the Toby Daye series (the UK kindle release dates would appear to be years behind everywhere else) I decided to visit her Indexing world again. For those who are new to Indexing, we follow a team from […]

The hegemony consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

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I had a very unclear understanding of what I thought this book was, not by reading about it or looking at reviews for it, but by looking at the original cover. It looks like a kind of sci-fi fantasy novel ala Dune or some other kind of adventure in space. And while there’s elements of that throughout, the book ended up being so much smarter, better written, and a number of other things as I started to understand what I was reading. We begin aboard […]

In the myriadic year of our Lord–the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!–Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir

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While it took me awhile to sort my way through the early morass of the world-building and language of the first chapter, I ended up enjoying this novel a lot, while still feeling annoyed at some of the too cleverness that often inhabits playful sci fi and fantasy (Brandon Sanderson is deeply enamored with overly cutesy and playful “repartee” at times, and so is this novel as well too often). So the world we’re looking at involves a series of nine aristocratic houses inhabiting nine […]



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