Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Writing Your Own Happy Ending

Read Between the Lines by Rachel Lacey

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This one grew on me after kind of a rocky start. A combination of it taking it’s time working through an awkward setup and taking some time to warm up to the writing style meant that I spent the first couple of sessions pretty cold on the whole thing, but I came around by the mid point. Rosie and Jane are many things to each other – Customer and bookshop owner, author and reader, twitter mutuals with a budding friendship, Awkardly, between an online pseudonym […]

Finding Hope in Confronting the Past and the Present

The Secret of You and Me by Melissa Lenhardt

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A lot of the queer fiction I have been recently has featured characters living in either New York or the Pacific North West, or both. Places with widespread acceptance of queerness, or at least enough that the characters are rarely under threat for it within the text, regardless of the real world. The Secret of You and Me on the other hand, draws much of it’s power from the inverse, from a lack of acceptance in community, of what it feels like when you are […]

A meta tale of time and paradoxes

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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You get the feeling that Emily St. John Mandel is not content to rest on her laurels. She not only one-ups herself with every book, she challenges the reader to accept that she’s not going to do what’s expected of her. These qualities make her a delightful author to follow. St. John Mandel has taken her usual formula of several characters spread out over geography, woven through time, effecting one another in ways they can neither perceive nor imagine, and inserted a version of herself […]

Joining the Club

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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What can I say about this book that hasn’t already been said about it by our community? It’s awesome? It took me too long to pick it up? The one advantage to waiting as long as I did, was that the spiritual sequel, Sea of Tranquility, was out by then and I could take in more of the characters from Mandel’s world as soon as I finished this one. Like all things St. John Mandel writes, The Glass Hotel is an intricately woven tale of […]

A fairytale for the end times

Borne by Jeff Vandermeer

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Did it take me over two years to read this book? Yes, yes it did. Had I stopped reading at the point where it was just about to get really good? Yes, yes I had. Was it worth it to get back into it and keep reading? Heck yeah. I put it down two years ago because it was weird in a way I wasn’t interested in. I was used to Vandermeer’s more sci-fi edged fever dream style of writing, but Borne had an air […]

“The three of them sat there – a Ministry agent, a half-djinn, and a cat (likely), staring out past the balcony to the sleeping city they somehow had to find a way to save.”

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

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CBR14 Bingo: “Snake” – A character lies to a partner for fear of reprisal.  The same charac ter under goes physical transformation due to heritage and the gifts of a goddess, which includes healing. An alternate 1912 Cairo with lady investigators and magic?  Yes, please!  40 years previous magic was reintroduced to the world and djinn were released by the magician, al’Jahiz.  After a fraught time, djinn were integrated into Egyptian society.  They have since used their abilities to bring wonderous, magical and mechanical inventions […]



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