Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“The fifth glass is unarguably clean. Especially because Haf has been pretending to scrub at a stain that isn’t there, like a horny Lady Macbeth wanting to prolong the moment.”

Make You Mine This Christmas by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

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I love the fake dating trope, so I was pleased as punch that November’s Illumicrate Afterlight book was Make You Mine This Christmas, even more so when forced proximity and all the bisexual chaos enter the equation. The story focuses on Haf who has been having a terrible year and lets her roommate convince her to join them at crashing a Christmas party they may or may not have been invited to. It’s at that party that Haf meets Christopher and following feeling badly for […]

“I knew beyond any doubt that there was genuine value to be found in my story.”

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

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I feel like this is going to be a tough one for me to review, because my relationship with the content that Hannah Gadsby creates is so personal to me and has been frankly crucial to how I am coming to understand myself that it’s a bit difficult to try to take that out of the equation and look at Ten Steps to Nanette on its own. I’ve likely watched Nanette half a dozen times in the past couple of years (and once again in […]

Three’s Company. Four’s Trouble. It’s All…Messy.

Wahala by Nikki May

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Wahala, Nikki May’s debut novel, has been getting a ton of buzz in library-land, so I was super excited to get my hands on a copy. Wahala follows three Anglo-Nigerian friends living in London, Ronke, Simi, and Boo. When Simi introduces Isobel, a friend from her childhood in Nigeria, to the group, cracks start to form. What follows is a roller-coaser train wreck that somehow manages to reach epic levels of preposterousness before anyone realizes where the chaos started from. But, before we get to […]

A Stunning Queer Romance Debut

Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly

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I received an ARC of Love & Other Disasters from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Love & Other Disasters publishes January 18th, 2022. I love when you can tell that a book was written from an authentic place, that the author is taking their own feelings, their own emotions, and building out from there to tell an honest story that they hope will resonate with readers. Anita Kelly (she/they) does just that in Love & Other Disasters and I’m so […]

“A good man is made through a lifetime of work. Great men are made by their monsters.”

The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold

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I’ll admit, while I’d seen Lisa Bee’s review of this earlier this year, the book didn’t really land on my radar until I watched Black Sails over the summer and it was mentioned that Luke Arnold who plays John Silver had written this as well as a sequel that came out this year, and that he did the audio version himself. I was suitably lured in by this info and many thanks to crystalclear for getting me the audio version. The book tells the story […]

The Magic is Gone. Now What?

The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold

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Perhaps it’s unfair that I’m reviewing The Last Smile of Sunder City only days after finishing Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. A Hugo award winning series is always going to be an unreachable pinnacle, especially by a debut author, and I’m probably doing an unrealistic comparison to expect Sunder City to feed the depth of my expectations after spending three books in Jemisin’s incredible craft. But I did expect more from Sunder City. This isn’t to say Arnold is a bad writer; he’s not. He’s a very […]



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