Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I’m sorry, Cannonballers, but I did not buy a ticket for the hype-train

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Let’s just jump right in. My biggest issue that I had with Gideon the Ninth is that I frequently did not know entirely what was going on. And not in a “Ohh, there’s a mystery afoot, and people are being secretive” nor in a “The narrator and I are both doubting reality” a la Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. I just kept feeling like I was missing things. Missing lines of dialogue, missing transitions, missing some exposition. Gideon Nav is a member of the Ninth House (as an indentured […]

“The whole place had the look of a picked-at-body. But damn! What a beautiful corpse.”

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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This book has received so much hype and lived up to every bit of praise it has received!  Thank you, Cannonballers for putting this on my radar and keeping it there.  I’m almost at a loss to review Gideon the Ninth since so many of y’all have done so already.  Here is a list of things that I enjoyed immensely, in no particular order: 1 – Muir’s word choices.  It’s delightful to be confronted with an unfamiliar word and Muir did it more in this […]

First of 3 potential Halloween reads

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard

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I had to go back through old reviews to see if I’d done this one before, and it turns out that 1) I seem to have done the rest of the series but not this first novel, and 2) a novel from this series was close to my first ever Cannonballer review (third one I think). Good times. I decided to re-read this for 2 reasons: 1) I wanted to do a Halloween read that was not Cassidy Blake 2 because I’m saving that for […]

Life Without the Necromancer

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I have loved the Johannes Cabal series so far. Each installment is modeled on a different author-style, including Ray Bradbury, steam punk, Lovecraft, and a monster apocalypse. This latest looks like it will be modeled on Poe, just based on the title The Fall of the House Cabal, but it’s not. This one breaks from the trend, and does its own thing, which in a way is in keeping with traditions of the series. The author says so directly in the Preface. Some of the […]



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