Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Came for the cover art; stayed for the story

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

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I’ve confessed before that I have a habit of buying books based on their covers. I totally bought this book based on the cover. I read the summary and I was like “hm.. it’s probably YA” and I don’t tend to buy YA these days, but then I said “I don’t care- that cover art!” So, it is YA, and like the cover, it’s very, very good YA. I’d say it wears it’s inspiration from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation trilogy proudly, and does a lot of […]

Am I missing something?

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It’s possible I’m the only one who didn’t know this is the first book of a trilogy. I don’t know if I’ll read the other two. There’s a mysterious place, Area X, where some kind of cataclysmic change happened, and it’s now abandoned and “walled” off, by an invisible barrier. Physically this place is unbelievably lush. VanderMeer somehow made me feel threatened by the growth of things. Psychologically the place has something else going on. A number of expeditions have tried to investigate or map […]

destruction, decimation, desolation, devastation….. Annihilation.

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So, I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover – but, just look at how beautiful its cover is. . . . The artwork is utterly stunning. I found this spectacular edition staring up at me from a display table in Hatchards London at St Pancras. It is not what I would normally read but I could not resist the cover – odd really. Annihilation should open up Vandermeer’s writing to a much larger audience, he’s fast paced, unsettling and compelling, he’ll have […]

The Nature of the Unknown

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  This book felt a lot like Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane. Very quietly brooding, the horrors sneak up on your when you’re not looking. There is little dialog and the characters have no names, but that takes nothing away from the simplistic beauty of this story. A female biologist and a group of four other women are sent on an expedition to the strange and uncanny Area X, where their mission is to record data on the un-peopled area and figure out […]

Divided we fall

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I’ve owned the Southern Reach trilogy for ages. I don’t even remember how I found out about it, if it was a fellow Cannonballer who recommended it or if I read about it on a friend’s Facebook page or something else entirely. I lent it to my dad before I had read it, and, because he lives in another country, it took about a year before I got it back. So when I finally started reading it, I had forgotten what it was about. I’m […]

I Didn’t Hate It But You Might

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Annihilation is the first in a trilogy about the mysterious Area X; cut off from the rest of civilization for decades, nature is taking over the landscape and hiding the area’s many secrets. An expedition of four women is sent to investigate, and they realize very quickly that all is not as they’ve been told. For one thing, there’s a mysterious underground tower that’s not marked on any map and what they find there will quickly divide the group as they try not to be contaminated […]



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