Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


cbr12bingo – Green (and another Bingo!)

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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I wanted so much more from this little dusty sketch of the dystopian west. It had a helluva hook – outlaw lesbians! Gun-slinging sisters-in-resistance! Non-binary action heroes! Unfortunately, it ground to a halt far short of its potential destination. It begins as all westerns do: someone hanging taut at the end of a rope. There are western tropes a-plenty; rough-riding, chaw-spitting, howdy pardnering, thankya kindly ma’ams litter the landscape. This wild west is wild for a different reason, though: we’re in a thinly plotted dystopia. […]

“She didn’t know how to get it—but she had a feeling that if she stuck with the Librarians for long enough, she might be able to figure it out. How to feast instead of starving. How to like the person who she was instead of fighting it.”

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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Upright Women Wanted was one of the books I was most looking forward to in 2020. This is my first Sarah Gailey, I know them from Twitter and I’ve clocked the reviews here of their books. But the description of Upright Women Wanted caught my attention and plunked itself on my to read list. Alas, I wanted to love this book but instead I just really liked it. Its good, its comfortably three stars good but the idea and themes deserve four. Unfortunately the beginning […]

A battleship… Uh oh, sharks.

Gyo by Junji Ito

Uzumaki by Junji Ito

The Test by Sylvain Neuvel

The Hero by Lee Child

Classic Krakauer by Jon Krakauer

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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Like a lot of you, I filled up on library books for the closures and hunkering down. My library announced that not only are they closing, that fines are waived, and nothing is due until the end of March, that also their dropboxes are closed. Who knows what that means, but for me it likely means I will read all the books I got, instead of sorting through and figuring it out one by one. Anyway, here’s my first chunk of reviews from all of […]

West Coast Magical Noir

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

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Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars is a magical noir in two ways: it’s magical in the sense of being addictive and transporting, and it’s also magical in the more straightforward sense, which is to say, it’s a noir in which most of the characters are, indeed, mages. Ivy Gamble, who has spent her life feeling inadequate compared to her magically-gifted sister, Tabitha, has turned into the hard-drinking, hard-living PI of the noir tradition–and, in keeping with predecessors like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Ivy lives in […]

And then of course, there was the fat sack of money.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

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The phrase over-promised and under-delivered comes roaring out of this book. The premise takes it cue from a never enacted US government program to import hippos into the southern US as a meat source to replace beef. And goes from there. There’s a kind of breathless introduction about how excited the author was about finding this all out and how this book explores that idea with a kind of steampunk-ish/alternative history take on things. And then taking those conceit and creating a kind of heist […]

And this one is just a grab bag!

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix

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We’ve got space spiders, a magical mystery, a serial-killer, and a literal deal with the devil. How’s that for a grab bag? (2 stars) Children of Time (Children of Time #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky I REALLY wanted to like this. I am mad that I didn’t. Set in the future, Children of Time takes place after humans have finished destroying the Earth. A spaceship takes off with the last of humanity in suspended animation, heading towards a planet that has been terraformed in preparation for […]



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