Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Uneven characters in real and D&D worlds

The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi & Fantasy Role Playing Club by Doug Henderson

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The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi & Fantasy Role Playing Club has a nice premise: group of queer pals, some of whom are very different from each other, get together weekly for their D&D sessions. Most of the real world characters and issues have a generally cliché but still cute quality to them. Ben is one of the main characters, he’s gay (or at least prefers men), college graduate (degree in history) who lives with his parent and makes spending money selling pop-culture paraphernalia online. He […]

It’s the Podcast but in Color!

The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins by Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, Carey Pietsch

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Ah TAZ, I can’t believe it’s only been a bit over a year since I finished the first arc. For those unfamiliar, The Adventure Zone podcast or, TAZ as it’s known to its fans, is the McElroy Brothers, (Justin, Travis and Griffin) and their father (Clint) playing D&D. The story they create in the first installment of the series, Here There Be Gerblins, is yer basic go-there-get-the-thing quest. Standard D&D stuff. That is a woefully reductive description of a storytelling experience that was so magical that I wish I could erase it out […]

The fine line between the game and life

Siege Tactics by Drew Hayes

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I have greatly enjoyed everything I have read by Drew Hayes. I even taught one of his novels this past spring semester; I plan to keep it. I enjoyed Siege Tactics, but it just seemed to lack a little something, like the usual sparkle of fun that everything else by Hayes that I’ve read. So, even if what follows seems like a list of complaints, which it kind of is, just to be clear, I really did enjoy this book. It just was slightly a […]

I am not a gamer, but I think I might know how it works now

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The premise of NPCs is not terribly original: what if when people stopped playing, the world of the D&D-like game kept moving, and the characters who aren’t actually players have independent existences. I feel like I’ve seen this sort of thing before, but at the same time, here it was still somewhat entertaining. This is not highly literary fiction one reads for the sake of being able to say one has read it; this is the kind of thing you read when you want something […]

Jelinas Reviews Cannonball #2: The Love Song of Brian J. Prisco

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A good coming-of-age novel is interesting in that, even if the main character’s experience is vastly different from the reader’s, the reader still feels the nostalgia.



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