Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Who fears fantasy tropes?

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

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Take an ancient prophecy, a genocide-fueled war, a post-apocalyptic setting, a reluctant teacher, band of friends, and a powerful heroine with anger management issues and you have Who Fears Death. This was award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor’s first novel for adults after publishing a few YA novels. This novel feels more like a hybrid of the two formats. The romance and coming-of-age aspects of YA with the more mature themes of an adult novel. Okorafor threw every fantasy trope she could into this brutal novel to […]

If 28 Days Later and The Road had a daughter

The Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

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This was Round 2 of my ongoing “what’s going in in the world of Irish science fiction?” quest. (Round 1 was here.) First off: great title, no? I was instantly intrigued, especially with the description, and I liked this weird sense I was getting of the post-apocalypse as a site of feminist possibility rather than just endless misogyny and threatened sexual violence. (Sigh.) The premise is straightforward: Orpen lives with her mother and her mother’s partner, Maeve, on an isolated island off the coast of […]

The world is falling apart, but the magic is coming together

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

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This felt like a post-apocalyptic story within a post-post-post-apocalyptic story. In the aftermath of the last Fifth Season (a catastrophic event that causes massive destruction and changes the face of the Earth for an unspecified amount of time; the last one started in the first book), Essun finds herself in a new community, with everyone learning how to live and work together. There are bandits and bad communities, internal strife, lack of food and resources, and the usual post-apocalyptic worries. Of course, this being an […]

Late to the party, but so glad I finally made it!

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

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I knew this would be good (pages and pages of CBR reviews told me so), and I was not disappointed. There was some truly incredible world-building, some interesting writing choices (second-person point of view chapters?), and characters I wanted to hug or fight battles with. I can’t wait to read the next one! It feels silly to recap the plot when everyone has read it already, but here goes (in case this review is the final straw that pushes you into reading it and joining […]

Clones! Super Soldiers! Post Apocalyptic Road Trip!

Deal With the Devil by Kit Rocha

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I have been anticipating this book for months and was delighted to get an arc from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Deal With the Devil was everything I wanted it to be. I’ve already read it FOUR times. Today a drive from Atlanta to Chattanooga would take about two hours, maybe more with traffic and where you start in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area. In Kit Rocha’s Deal with the Devil, it’s about 5 days with decomposing roadways, collapsed bridges, medical emergencies, armed […]

A much stranger re-read than I was expecting

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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Official book description: DAY ONE The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. WEEK TWO Civilization has crumbled. YEAR TWENTY A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has […]



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