Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“New City, Who Dis?”

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin

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I discovered N.K. Jemisin through The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy.  Loved the first two, was very ‘meh’ about the third.  Then The Fifth Season erupted onto the scene and blew my mind with such a creative fantasy, Jemisin became an auto-buy author.  She hasn’t disappointed me yet and The World We Make is another excellent entry in her list of works. In Jemisin’s world, cities have the ability to awaken.  When enough people live in them, when the idea of the city’s identity becomes a belief […]

One for Next Year

The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher

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The Christmasaurus is exactly what you expect from a Christmas story about a dinosaur who is blue, one of the kind, and lives at the North Pole. I mean I have seen candy canes less sweetly sugary than this Tom Fletcher story! That does not make it a bad book, just predictable for the adult reader. Christmasaurus wants to fly. Of course, the lessons (one a year for almost four years) do not seem to stick. But one Christmas Eve Santa came to say, Christmasaurus […]

Everyone deserves rest, and you don’t have to earn it

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

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Dex is a monk who serves a bear god whose purview is comfort, rest, relaxation, and pleasure. Needing a change in their life, Dex decides to switch up their practice from working in a garden to being a tea monk. Dex goes from town to town, listening to people’s problems, and offering a kind word and personalized cup of tea to soothe them. Dex eventually builds a reputation for themself as one of the best tea monks out there, and yet they are still not […]

Richard Powers Round Up

The Time of our Singing by Richard Powers

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

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Galatea 2.2 – 4/5 This is a reread from when I was in grad school, so something close to 20 years. I’d first heard of this book and Richard Powers from a selection being anthologized in the Norton American lit. It’s a weird book to anthologize because of how cohesive the entirety of the book is and how dependent it is on context. But Richard Powers doesn’t really write short fiction and they must have wanted him in there. The book is not exactly semi-autobiographical, […]

Mermaids, lantern fish and a little courage

A Dive Into the Blue. by Ellie Huynh

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The one fear/issue I did not have about learning to swim was that the drain in the pool would pull me in, like some Kraken waiting to bring me to Davy Jones locker. But, now well, I still don’t. And that is because of the little girl in A Dive Into the Blue. Ellie Huynh gives us a story of courage and bravery and literally diving right into the problem. Our small girl is at the edge of the diving board, the drain looking up […]

The most surreal collection I have ever read

Gods of Want: Stories by K-Ming Chang

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I picked up this book for a couple of reasons. One, I really enjoy short story collections. Two, I read a short blurb about this book about that described it as spanning the space between magical realism and fantasy which totally piqued my interest. It was available as an audiobook from my local library, so I checked it out. Typically when I read a collection of short stories, I like to review the collection as a whole as well as give a brief review of […]



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