Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Another Gas Lamp Mystery in Space!

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

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Mossa and Pleiti are back! Take a Sherlock Holmes style mystery (gaslamps, lots of fog, some terribly repressed people) but set it far in the future, on huge platforms that orbit the planet Jupiter, where humanity settled after we wrecked Earth so badly we couldn’t stay. Add in a University setting and the subsequent academic jockeying, rivalry, and backstabbing, and you’ve got yourself a potent combination! Book 2 in the series sees Mossa looking into the disappearance of Stravan, a student at Valdegeld University where […]

Monstrous witches haunt rural Mexico and a New England college town

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcie

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There’s an odd paradox for Indigenous people and the word “witch.” On the one hand, our medicine people, healers, doctors, priests, and midwives were often vilified with words like “witch doctor” and accused of alignment with various Christian devils, demons, and satans. It’s easy to see a sort of kinship with women who were villified with these words and with pagans from other continents who today sometimes have embraced the term of witch. On the other hand, our traditional tales tell stories of dangerous beings, […]

Aww, Who’s the Good Boi?

Widow-Maker by Paul Doiron

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Unlike the previous Mike Bowditch, game warden series, this book focuses on a particular moral dilemma.  A couple of teens are attending an elite ski boarding school near the Widow-maker Ski Resort in central Maine.  The girl, about a year younger, is from a wealthy connected family and is clearly being groomed to be a champion.  The boy, a scholarship kid, has a more uncertain future, but he is putting his best effort into it.  But things don’t go well, and the boy, who has […]

When the zombie outbreak happened, I didn’t expect zombie gnomes

Hooves of Death, Volume 1 by Sam Bragg

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While I liked this book, I’m not really sure how to write about it. Hooves of Death, Volume 1 by Sam Bragg has many of the familiar themes, settings and story arcs you find in young adult literature, but it is also new and fresh. There are parts I did not like, parts I loved and one or two parts where I went “huh?” There are ups and downs. We follow one human and a few unicorns that escaped the destruction of their compound (don’t […]

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

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Again. This was bonkers in a good way. I re-read this book three times this weekend because it’s just so good. I know Strange Buildings is coming out next year and I can’t wait. I loved this plot and I didn’t see a thing coming that we got. I think this one was definitely more in the horror side of the realm than Strange Houses (just cause of the ending) but honestly I loved them both to bits and I would recommend running out to get both […]

A Poirot without Poirot

The Hollow by Agatha Christie

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I thought I had read every Agatha Christie there is, but I came across one I hadn’t read (or don’t remember having read): The Hollow. It is a Hercule Poirot novel, but he hardly features in the story at all. He appears a few times, including the end, but the book really centers on the characters/suspects. Lady Lucy Angkatell and her husband Lord Henry have an estate called the Hollow. At a weekend gathering (it’s always a weekend gathering, isn’t it?), an unfaithful doctor is […]



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