Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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> Genre: Western

American Ghost Stories

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

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Claire Vaye Watkins has an infamous father. I don’t point this out in a salacious “looky here” way, but this father looms large over the first story in this collection. Her father is Tex Watson, yes, that Tex Watson. Murderer. Manson Family member. Currently and indefinitely imprisoned Tex Watson who married a prison pen pal and fathered four children while in jail. Claire wrests the reins from her father, her family, and her history to tell her own story- and it’s a doozy. All of […]

“And then I had my greatest stroke of genius since that ham sandwich with pickles that time.”

Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear

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At one point, I was considering giving this five stars, I was having so much fun with it. Some pacing issues towards the end, as well a tiny quibble with the ending brought me back down to earth, though. But overall, fun! Karen Memory is a book I wasn’t really looking forward to reading, for what reason I’m not sure. I’d never read Elizabeth Bear before (but will in future!), and sometimes Westerns just don’t work for me (and other times I love them). But […]

Getting Into Dodge

Doc by Mary Doria Russell

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By now, the legend of John Henry “Doc” Holliday has been amended and corrected so many times that it can feel like the truth might be irretrievable. Enter Mary Doria Russell’s Doc, which sets out to tell the truth of the man through fiction. Doc tells the story of its titular dentist from his days as a young man in antebellum Georgia to his infamous days associating with the Earp brothers in the wild west outpost of Dodge City, Kansas. Russell guides the reader through […]

When West Meets East, Sharpshooters and Demons

Shadow Roads (Volume One) by Cullen Bunn

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Shadow Roads (Volume One) is one very large screwy ride! Cullen Bunn and Brain Hurrt make realism and science fiction collide. They bleed together to create a familiar but new world where Victorina England and the American old west are only a portal jump away from each other. There is magic, native tribes and demons. There are people who are not what they seem and people who are the comic relief. There is an Annie Oakley-like kid who also could pass herself off for Little […]

A single story told as though it’s the only one

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls WIlder

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For those of you who missed reading this American children’s classic in your own youth, as I did, Little House on the Prairie is the second (or third, depending on whether you count Farmer Boy, apparently) in Ingalls’ multi-volume Little House set, after Little House in the Big Woods.  It was my first foray in Ingalls’ works, and I don’t think I missed anything by starting out of order.  The book kicks off with Pa Ingalls yearning for a place with less people (the Big […]



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