Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Some big hits and major misses in an overall forgettable collection

Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane by Jonathan Oliver

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Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, edited by Jonathan Oliver, is an anthology of short stories centered around magic in all its various forms: ancient folk magic, new age witchcraft, stage magic, and even some techno-magic. There are 15 short stories in this collection, and, over all, this anthology is fine. Too often, the stories told are not short stories but rather truncated ones. For many of the stories, it feels as though the authors were limited by a page or word maximum […]

Teetering on the Edge of Fantastic

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

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While buying a copy of Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble, Amazon alerted me that I “might also like” Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I’ve never read Swamplandia (although I’m totally going to now), and I knew nothing of Russell and her work, but the title sounded awesome and I’m always looking for quality speculative short fiction. I was not disappointed. Russell’s fabulous and her collection is as varied and weird and wonderful as the title suggests. Her work runs the gambit from vampires subsisting on lemons in […]

Ye’ll maybe find a use for yourself.

Seven Stones to Stand or Fall by Diana Gabaldon

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Many of the book series that I enjoy have novellas or short stories available electronically. I’m not a Kindle person so I generally end up missing out on these smaller literary nuggets that explore secondary characters or flesh out backstories. I bought this when it was published over two years ago, but allowed it to languish on my TBR pile until now. Outlander books take preparation. They are heavy tomes and I need to be ready to brew a cup of tea and snuggle up for a […]

Were I to Pull Every Line that Made Me Gasp I Would be Quoting the Book in its Entirety

The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

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I’d lick my lips, slowly, letting my pink tongue dangle out of my black mouth a little just like some animal waiting by the side of the road for the driver who killed it to come back one more time and kill it again This collection is stitched together with muscle, sinew, and blood. Samantha Hunt writes in a way that tears apart beautiful language and forces you to read the story through twisted entrails like a time-forgotten seer. The tales are modern in theme […]

The Garment in Which Memory is Stitched

My Wedding Dress: True-life Tales of Lace, Laughter, Tears, & Tulle by Edited by Susuan Whelhan & Anne Laurel Carter

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Finding my own wedding dress was a study in disappointment. I didn’t have any of the appropriate reactions I felt I was supposed to have, and the ‘yes, this is the dress,’ moment didn’t happen until I went to the last fitting. Indeed the entire process of planning my wedding unearthed strange emotions and bizarre traditions and expectations I’d never thought mattered very much. In the end it was a great day, and much to my own annoyance, I have to admit I’m glad we […]

Sleepy short stories

In the Teeth of the Evidence by Dorothy L. Sayers

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In the Teeth of the Evidence is a collection of Dorothy L. Sayers’ short mystery/ detective stories, a number of which feature her best known detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg, and the rest of which are stand alone tales.  I took a Detective Fiction class way back in college, so I had some name recognition for Sayers, but I couldn’t have told you much about her work.  This novel brought some of that information back to me- Wimsey and Egg are detectives from […]



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