Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Personhood in Sci-Fi

Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon

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Volatile Memory fulfills the “purple” square on CBR17 bingo. Generally speaking, I don’t consider myself a sci-fi reader, but Volatile Memory kept coming across my feeds because it’s sapphic and I finally gave into the promo, and I’m glad I did because this ended up being a really interesting story. I’d put it in the same conversations as books like Automatic Noodle and The Stars Too Fondly for the ways it explores transness and gender through presentation as well as whether memories make a person […]

And the Rose Goes Oh No

Here For the Wrong Reasons by Annabel Paulsen and Lydia Wang

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: review. I read this based on the review here.  My journey into sapphic romance continues with this fun little number. Also, before I begin, the women who co-wrote this apparently fell in love each other while writing it, which is the most adorable thing ever. And in the last romance I read, the writers were a wife-wife team. So maybe I have a thing? Or maybe it’s just coincidence. Either way, I don’t follow The Bachelor or shows like […]

Folktales and cycles through history

Songs for Ghosts by Clara Kumagai

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Songs for Ghosts fulfills the “culture” square on CBR17 Bingo. Songs for Ghosts is a beautiful, tragic story of the power of stories and love, as well as the way past choices can create cycles throughout time. I’m unfamiliar with it, but in the afterword the author talks about Songs for Ghosts being a retelling of Madama Butterfly opera by Puccini where Cio-Cio-San has more agency than just the reductive submissive wife trope. Adam is a seventeen year old whose boyfriend just broke up with […]

A doozy of a book!

You Weren't Meant to be Human by Andrew Joseph White

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You Weren’t Meant to be Human fulfills the “black” square on CBR17 Bingo I had Andrew Joseph White on my radar from his debut, but it wasn’t until Compound Fracture that I finally read one of his books. Even though most of his books haven’t exactly been for me, I have a special spot in my heart for Appalachia, and especially West Virigina because it will always be home. So when I saw AJW’s upcoming adult debut was set in WV, I knew I needed to […]

One of my favorite fantasies

The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri

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The Oleander Sword fulfills the “green” square on CBR17 Bingo. I read and reviewed this book for the first time back in 2022 and it still has me absolutely devastated and sitting here filled with feelings. Luckily this time around I have The Lotus Empire at hand and don’t have to wait to find out what happens next for Priya and Malini! The Oleander Sword takes place a year after The Jasmine Throne and is a story full of the ripple effects of war and […]

A hopeful future with robots and food

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

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If you need a story of chosen family and hope and good food, Automatic Noodle absolutely fits the bill. This is a delightful novella of a near-future where California has split from the United States after war, and part of California progressiveness was to give civil rights to human equivalent embodied intelligence (HEEI) robots. But those rights are limited – they’re not able to use a bank, own property, and there’s lots of prejudice against robots (very allegorical to American attitudes towards immigrants and marginalized […]



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