Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


A Dinétah monster killer

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

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I was familiar with Rebecca Roanhorse from Twitter and her articles on Tor.com, so definitely excited for Trail of Lightning‘s release last year. I guess I wasn’t the only one because it was sold out at The Ripped Bodice when I went to buy it! Always a good sign and her novel did not disappoint. Trail of Lightning is the first entry in the series: The Sixth World. After a climate apocalypse that drowns most of the world, several nasty things that go bump in the […]

3 Little, 2 Little, 1 Little Indian

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

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Just finished this short novel and I’m honestly on the fence about it. Frenchie is one of several Indigenous natives on a northward trek across a hostile, post-apocalypse North America. In many ways, I find lots of parallels to the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, in that Frenchie and his small tribe are beset on all sides by a over-powerful and desperate state government and Indian turncoats working for the government. The government is working hard to corral all indigenous peoples into schools and clinics, […]

Snubbed? Sure, but still a winning story

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If I am reading my research correctly, Louise Erdrich’s The Birchback House was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist. I know this book was on my shelf for a long time, but I was saving it for the Snubbed category which is no shame as it went up against some AMAZING books. She went up against Kimberly Willis Holt (winner. Yay! LOVED the book/author), Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (OMG! What a book/author!), Polly Horvath (did not read Trolls but she is very good) and Walter […]

I’ve been waiting for this moment for Cannonball my life, oh Lord

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CBR10Bingo: Backlog (Cannonball! and Bingo! Woohoo!) After reading a few Sherman Alexie books a few years ago, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony started popping up in my suggestions, and for some reason, I thought it was poetry rather than a novel. Once I read the description, I put it on my wishlist, where it languished for several months until I finally bought a copy last summer at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles on a long lunch break from jury duty. I’ve pulled it off […]

Spoiler: white people are unspeakably awful to Native Americans (Not a spoiler)

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Once again, my favorite podcast Literary Disco delivers with an outstanding book recommendation. I hadn’t heard of this book, but thankfully the wait for it was long at my local library. I say thankfully because I am glad that people are becoming familiar with this gruesome and awesome (in the awe-stricken sense of the word) true story that should mar our nations history, if the people of our nation knew anything about it. And if, um, it wasn’t already super thoroughly marred. The Osage Nation, […]

The weather outside is frightful…

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I don’t live in a place that has much winter anymore, so when I get the hankering for snow and ice, I tend to reach for mysteries that take place in wintery places. Stan Jones writes a series of entertaining mysteries about an Inupiat state trooper in Chukchi. Nathan Active was fostered to a white family as a baby, so he knows little of the culture of the Inupiat – so an engaging fish out of water story. The focus of the mystery is on several […]



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