Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An AU of Steampunk Egypt, a magical whodunnit, and a great cast of characters. What more could you want?

A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark

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BINGO – REC’D by the wonderful narfna, CoffeeShopReader, ElCicco, Emmalita, and witcherwill. Their reviews are all linked above. I encourage you to read all of these great reviews as well. Fatma el-Sha’arawi is an agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities in an alternate history of Egypt in the 1910s. She is called in to investigate the brutal murders of a cult of people who worship al-Jahiz, the man who brought magic and the djinn into the world. Soon enough, a person claiming […]

Sex, death, and queerness: a delightfully horrifying collection

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

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BINGO – Reader’s Choice in place of Home In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado has compiled eight short stories that are all unabashedly queer and horrifying. Much like Mariana Enriquez, another Latina short story horror writer I’ve read this year, Machado erases the line between the natural and supernatural. Magical realism floods every sentence. Whereas Enriquez’s stories tend to focus on social structures and politics, Machado focuses on sex and gender identity. In these short stories, Machado manages to illicit dread and […]

Race, Zombies and US History

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland

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I read and reviewed Dread Nation a couple of years ago but felt that I needed to do a re-read to refresh my memory before starting book 2 — Deathless Divide. In these novels, Justina Ireland imagines the US in the period immediately following the Civil War but with a strange twist. At the Battle of Gettysburg, the war ended when the battlefield dead rose up as zombies or shamblers, forcing Union and Rebel soldiers to work together against the undead. A new kind of […]

With set-up all taken care of, Pierce shines again

Street Magic by Tamora Pierce

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BINGO – Cityscape Briar Moss and his teacher Rosethorn have travelled to Chammur in order to expose Briar to the greater world and help farmers with their crops. While in Chammur, Briar gets to know the local street kids. He was a former street kid himself, so he feels an automatic kinship with these ganged up kiddos. One child, Evvy, stands out to Briar and not only because she’s the only street kid who isn’t in a gang. She has ambient magic that presents itself […]

The boredom, the rush, the despair, the fear and the hope

Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze

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Bingo: Rep (with a bingo for row 3) CW: violence, drug use. Snoopz, our protagonist, is in a car that’s slowly trailing a woman down a fancy street in London. As she reaches the front door of her house, Snoopz and his friend Gotti get out, sneak up behind her, and strike: Snoopz puts her in a chokehold while Gotti struggles to snap off the woman’s diamond-encrusted Cartier. Snoopz spots a giant diamond ring on her finger, but try as he might, he can’t remove […]

Sold 9 million copies in two years, and was adapted into one of the best movies ever made. It holds up pretty well.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

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This is my second go at this review. I didn’t feel as though my initial review was in-depth enough. The word “mafia” first began appearing in the mid- to late-1800s in Italy, and the criminal underworld had certainly existed for centuries. But The Godfather really created much of what we think of when we here the word “mafia”. And there’s a logic reason for this: JFK. Prior to the early 1960s, movies depicting organized crime (like 1932’s Scarface) didn’t talk about “the mafia”. They were “gangster […]



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