Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Two Very Different Reads That Explore Identity

Love You a Latke by Amanda Elliot

Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

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Love You a Latke by Amanda Elliot Abby and Seth seem to be the only Jews living in their small town in Vermont. While Abby finds Seth’s cheerfulness annoying—especially as she is anything but cheerful—she agrees to pretend to be his Nice Jewish Girlfriend when he goes for Chanukah in exchange for helping her find vendors to put on a Chanukah festival in their town that she was roped into organizing. She’s hoping it will drive business to her struggling coffeeshop. One of the things […]

Tusks of Extinction

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Naylor

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This is a well-crafted little novella. The consciousness of our protagonist, Damira, has been “uploaded” into a mammoth (!), which scientists have brought back from extinction. Damira had been an elephant activist, an anti-poaching conservationist. After she uploads her consciousness to a vaguely explained political lab, and after her subsequent death, and after the extinction of African elephants, scientists successfully bring back the mammoth. Unfortunately, the neo-mammoths don’t know how to behave like mammoths, on account of being previously extinct. Also, poachers still exist, and […]

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

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When a scientist is murdered in the last outpost of humanity left in the world, the villagers must seek justice or all face death. I read Turton’s debut The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle several years ago, and while I enjoyed piecing together the mystery and the science fiction underpinnings of the story, I though the solution got too convoluted in the end. This book has a similar problem, but as the focus for much of the story is the science fiction setting and […]

Down the future rabbit hole

Lost in the Future Vol 1: The Storm by Damian

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Lost in the Future by Damian was beautifully illustrated by Àlex Fuentes. I discovered this at Forbidden Planet during a London trip this year. I unintentionally plan book crawls, sometimes with too ambitious goals, whenever I travel. I had about 5 minutes until they closed to pick something, and this is what I chose. During a field trip, a group of kids wanders off and falls down a hole. It’s giving Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole meets Adventure Time vibes. They discover it’s a portal and […]

Seattle? Yes. Starbucks? Bit too early for that.

Ishmael by Barbara Hambly

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When my mother was attending University, the drama professor had Mom and others pickup Jim Steranko, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov and most importantly for this review Gene Roddenberry at the airport and drive them around when they had been booked for a series of lectures they gave at the school.  So I have heard all the stories told at these lectures. Combined with my maternal aunt’s love affair with all things Star Trek (until my mother took her to see A New Hope; then it […]

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi

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  Honestly, I don’t think I am going to finish this anthology. I usually like Scalzi okay, but this story took way too long to get going and even one you get to the point of the story, I just didn’t care that much about it. That said, the ending was a game changer, but that was way too late for me to even really think this was a good story. I did think that Scalzi did a great job with time travel, paradoxes, etc. […]



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