Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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cbr12bingo – Green (and another Bingo!)

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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I wanted so much more from this little dusty sketch of the dystopian west. It had a helluva hook – outlaw lesbians! Gun-slinging sisters-in-resistance! Non-binary action heroes! Unfortunately, it ground to a halt far short of its potential destination. It begins as all westerns do: someone hanging taut at the end of a rope. There are western tropes a-plenty; rough-riding, chaw-spitting, howdy pardnering, thankya kindly ma’ams litter the landscape. This wild west is wild for a different reason, though: we’re in a thinly plotted dystopia. […]

Too Much and Too Little

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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Rivers Solomon tells an unflinching tale of slavery and survival, set in a future that is horrifically similar to both America’s dreadful past and terrible present. They sugarcoat nothing; what else would you expect from a story that starts with a gruesome amputation? I have to applaud Solomon for writing a brutal and gut wrenching story. They shout out the horrors of racism, giving graphic depictions of brutality. Black women are tortured, raped, and publicly executed, and Solomon makes you stare at these scenes of […]

Dear Diary; nature has gone haywire

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

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A young Native American woman learns that she is pregnant in a time of miracles and disaster; nature has gone haywire. Evolution has sped up, gone sideways, and/or stopped all together. Times are trying. It is a particularly frightening time to be a single person with an unplanned pregnancy- especially when religious-esque government agents are collecting and imprisoning pregnant women. Our narrator, Cedar, gives us her story through the pages of her diary. She is keeping accounts of her body and the world around her […]

The Power, by Naomi Alderman (A belated start to CBR11)

The Power by Naomi Alderman

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    I’ve been stuck in a weird reading hiatus recently. Weird for me because I’m normally the type of nerd who considers it bragging rights if I make it to 50 books in year. It’s an identity point for better or worse. However, for a lot reasons, (most of them uninteresting) I just…stopped for about a year and a half. I’m not completely sure what happened to all the time that I used to spend reading (Twitter definitely played more of a role than […]

“Better nonexistence than pain” – whatever, dude

Office of Mercy by Ariel Djanikian

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Do you guys find it harder to write a spoiler-free review when it’s for a book you didn’t like? My last two reviews have been for books that were just kind of meh, but then had aggravating endings. It’s tough not to talk about it! Three hundred years after an apocalypse only referred to as “The Storm,” the surviving civilizations are gathered in bunkers and domes. Everyone is issued food, clothing, jobs, apartments, etc.: everything a person needs. The entire occupation of the settlements is […]

The novel we deserve

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American War is the most timely and poignant novel I’ve read in years. Grim from the first chapter, this isn’t a novel that will make you cry, but it sure as hell will make you despair. Set in 2075, the America of this future has been torn apart by a second Civil War. Three Southern states have broken off from the Union in order to maintain the freedom to use fossil fuels, which have been banned by the Union due to the devastation they have wrought on the continent. […]



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