Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Emotion check: Having someone else support your bad decisions feels kind of good”

Platform Decay: Murderbot Diaries Book 8 by Martha Wells

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This latest Murderbot installment is short (150 pages) but full of the snark and excitement one has come to expect from the series. It is missing the usual cast of characters (including my favorite ART) but it introduces some new ones and of course focuses on everyone’s favorite SecUnit. The action of Platform Decay occurs on a torus, that is, a space station ring surrounding a decaying planet. The torus is man-made and contains a variety of biomes, mining and farming zones, habitation areas and […]

A brilliant (but bloody) blend of history and fantasy

He Who Drowned the World: The Radiant Emperor Duology Book 2 by Shelley Parker-Chan

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This finale to Shelley Parker-Chan’s The Radiant Emperor Duology was outstanding. As with the first book (She Who Became the Sun), Parker-Chan focuses on the political and military machinations of a handful of ambitious individuals, each desperate for power and/or revenge. Parker-Chan has created complex characters who, despite their violent and frequently perverse proclivities, can also occasionally inspire pity. The court intrigues and double crossings had me on the edge of my seat, and the battles — sometimes featuring very hungry ghosts — were harrowing. […]

Lonely Angry Child

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

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A well-written and shockingly honest but very tough read for me. I just kept whip lashing between enraged and sad. Seventeen year old Waldo is a high school senior with a dead end job and not much else. She lives with her single mother who is never actually home. She is starving- for clothes, sugar, love, attention, anything… for her creative writing teacher Mr. Korgy. He complements her unique voice and seems to see her in a way nobody else does. He is twice her […]

The Outsiders

She Who Became the Sun: The Radiant Emperor Duology Book One by Shelley Parker-Chan

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Beginning in 1340s China, She Who Became the Sun opens with a 10 year old girl, never named, living in utter poverty in a small village. She has already lost her mother and several siblings to starvation. The girl, her father and an older brother named Zhu are the only survivors. Zhu was meant to be sent to a monastery when he was old enough, and a fortune teller predicted greatness for him, but for the little girl he predicted, literally, nothing. Yet the girl […]

Exciting historical fiction for the kids

The Bletchley Riddle by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin

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The Bletchley Riddle, a novel for readers age 10-14, was co-written by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin. The two authors take turns writing chapters from the points of view of 14-year-old Lizzie (Sepetys) and her 19-year-old brother Jakob (Sheinkin). It’s a fast-paced, thrilling and educational mystery/spy novel set in the early days of WWII at Great Britain’s top secret location for code breaking — Bletchley Park. Sepetys and Sheinkin include tons of fascinating historical facts and real historical figures in their story. When the story […]

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: A Novel by Stephen Graham Jones

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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a wild and bloody novel, and I’ve never read anything quite like it. Stephen Graham Jones takes the vampire story into new territory – late 19th and early 20th century Montana, the Western frontier where whites are violently encroaching and native peoples find their communities and their environment subject to horrendous brutality and destruction. What better or more appropriate way to tell American History than through a horror story. The novel begins in contemporary Wyoming where 42-year-old Communications and Journalism […]



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