Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Space Archeology and a Mystery

The Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey & Mercedes Lackey

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Tia Cade enjoys her life moving from dig site to dig site and planet to planet with her archeologist parents.  Precocious and inquisitive, she doesn’t mind that her best friend is a brainship or that she doesn’t get to spend time with other children her age.  However, when an unknown space disease leaves her almost completely paralyzed, Tia gets a new lease on life as a brainship as well as a desire to track down the disease that she caught and make sure no else […]

Spaceship Coming of Age

PartnerShip by Anne McCaffrey & Margaret Ball

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Newly commissioned brainship, Nancia is excited for her first mission.  However, her first group of passengers, all High Family scions like herself, don’t seem to realize that she’s brainship, and when Nancia doesn’t inform them of the fact, she overhears a number of things that trouble her.  Five years later, those conversations come to haunt her as Nancia is pulled into an investigation that links to those same passengers. I liked this one more than the Ship Who Sang.  It’s more of a coming of […]

Ambivalence

The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey

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Born with severe physical birth defects, nothing is wrong with Helva’s mind.  So as an infant she’s implanted in a shell, destined to one day be the mind that runs a spaceship.  Fascinated with music, Helva earns the moniker “the ship who sang”.  Setting off with her human partner (called a brawn), Helva will find that the joys and challenges of being herself are as vast as space itself. I don’t know how I feel about this book.  I’m sure I read it before when […]

Life has thrown a lot at me recently, so here are all the reviews I forgot to write!

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

The Miraculous by Jess Redman

The Tea Dragon Festival by K. O'Neill

An Exchange of Gifts by Anne McCaffrey

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

The Sandman: Act I by Neil Gaiman

The Princess Spy by Larry Loftis

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The Bear and the Nightingale By Katherine Arden (Warning – the review of this book contains f-bombs!) I know this was supposed to be based on a fairy tale, and some parts seemed very fairy tale-like (especially the story the nanny told toward the beginning with the girls in the snow) but I did not correlate them to any story I already knew.  I appreciated the involvement of the Russian household spirits, and how the village did quite well combining their religion and their culture […]

Dragons in the Sky

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

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There are two fantasy genre tropes that I could do without. First, the stagnation: the world has been in a rot for ages, even thousands of years with no progress at all. It was better then: the society of yore was wealthier, the people mightier, wiser, and had longer lifespans. (They probably had better dental hygiene, too, although this is pure speculation.) The current civilisation has lost a lot of the knowledge of magic and technology, especially the good guys; the bad ones seem to […]

If Wishes Were Dragons Some People Would Fly Between

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  Dragonsdawn is the ninth book in the Dragonriders of Pern series but takes place approximately 2,500 years before Dragonflight, the first book in the series. I discovered Anne McCaffrey in an English textbook sample my dad brought home from school when I was about 13. There was an excerpt from Dragonsinger in there and I fell in love. I devoured every Pern book our local library had over the next few months and set out to collect the ones they didn’t have. I purchased […]



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