Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Give a girl a warning she’s going to be mind flipped…only I didn’t say flipped

Forevr by Brian Brown

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Recently I have read two books that have given me a gut punch for all the right and wrong reasons. Forevr (yes, that is how it is spelled) by Brian Brown, is one of them.  After reading Brown’s book I said to myself: DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG (but I didn’t say Dang)! What the heck was that? I think I needed to take a dramamine pill before reading. I mean how do you process a thoughtful, dark, a bit sad, a bit too could happen, semi-humours ride through […]

Imagination is real

The Book Censor’s Library: A Novel by Bothayna Al-Essa

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This is a wonderful book about imagination, books, libraries, and censorship. It’s a love song to some literary classics and a picture of a dystopian not-too-distant future where most literature is banned and burned. How far would you go to preserve the ideas and literary creations that have formed us? What is worth saving? What price would you pay? The characters in this book have no names; rather they have titles or descriptors. The main character is the Book Censor, a man who wants only […]

“The Next Right Thing”

Gigs by Mark Mosedale and Si Smith

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Right now, I really dislike Mark Mosedale, Si Smith,Top Shelf Productions, and the person who sent me the reader’s copy of Gigs by Smosedale and illustrated by Smith. I dislike you because you made me feel all the emotions at once. You made me unable to put my reader copy down. You made me want to finish before it comes out mid-June 2026 so I can get it on release day, stand at the front doors and tell customers, “You ain’t leaving until you buy […]

Accept the things you cannot change or change the things you cannot accept?

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

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The Memory Police is an unsettling novel. The descriptions I read in advance made it sound a bit like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. It is a dystopian novel, and it does involve the authoritarian suppression of knowledge and personal freedom, but while I think of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as “political” science fiction, The Memory Police is not exactly that. The most disturbing acts of suppression in The Memory Police come from within the people themselves. The story is set on an island where some […]

This in’t about adoption

Mother Nature by Jamie Lee Curtis, Russell Goldman and Karl Stevens

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SOME SPOILERS and possible triggers (but not as many as are in the book). Sometimes I wonder if people like something because they are “supposed to.” We are “supposed to” like a story about environmentalism. We are “supposed to” like something because the character(s) are of a minority (in Mother Nature by Jamie Lee Curtis, Russell Goldman, and illustrator Karl Stevens they are Native, two characters are queer, and at least two other people are of color). But that does not mean the book will […]

“I wasn’t just going to abandon you, Carl,” Donut said. “Who do you think I am? Miss Beatrice?”

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman

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Carl, Donut and Mongo have made it to the fourth level of the dungeon. This time, there are trains. So many trains. The game appears to have constructed a labyrinthine tangle of all of the world’s underground railway systems, and there are new and strange rules to get used to. There are bounties awarded to anyone who kills any of the players in the top ten, which now include both Carl and Donut. There are all manner of strange monsters on the various trains and […]



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