Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“There was something wrong with Gaea Station. There had always been something wrong with Gaea Station.”

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

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I actually really liked this, and I’m really surprised about it. This book deserves a longer, more thorough review, but I’m just not capable of doing that at the moment. I can see how this book wouldn’t work for some people, but if it doesn’t, it seems a matter of taste to me. I feel like Emily Tesh knew exactly what she wanted to do with the story, and pulled it off. The concepts, characters, plot twists, and everything else this book was wanting to […]

Why So Unserious?

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

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I read Starter Villain after my hold came up in the library. That’s always fun, it’s like winning a small lottery, especially if the book has many holds. I liked this; I try not to read other people’s reviews of the same books I read before writing the review, but I did read one for this where the reviewer didn’t like the end and felt like it made the entire thing feel unreal. Which I can understand, but I did not feel that way. There […]

Codependant Hacker in Search of a Cause

The Salvation Gambit by Emily Skrutskie

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After a job gone wrong, Murdock and her gang of con artists are tithed to a sentient warship that’s styled itself into a punitive god. Escaping the ship would be hard enough – but when the Justice takes a personal interest in Murdock, the stakes only get higher. I have been slowing dipping my toes into the space opera genre, mostly via the wonderful Becky Chambers, but I am always on the lookout for more. And the premise of this book immediately sold me – […]

Don’t get too excited about the psychic cats

Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes

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From the official plot summary: Captain Eva Innocente and the crew of La Sirena Negra cruise the galaxy delivering small cargo for even smaller profits. When her sister Mari is kidnapped by The Fridge, a shadowy syndicate that holds people hostage in cryostasis, Eva must undergo a series of unpleasant, dangerous missions to pay the ransom.But Eva may lose her mind before she can raise the money. The tagline for this book is “Kidnappers. Alien Emperors. Psychic cats. And she’s out of coffee.” Two of […]

An archaeologist, an amusement park employee, a talking pig. Everyone is doing their best.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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In 2020, when many of us began working from home, I started listening to a podcast series called The Happiness Lab. The creators had produced a string of episodes dedicated to coping with the pandemic, and one episode in particular stuck with me. The theme was that, at some point, we would come out on the other side of our current global challenge, and one way to get through it was to think about what kind of story we want to be able to tell […]

Oh Lois, you hold my heart so gently.

Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

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So, you pick up a science fiction mystery novel by your favorite author. You know the one, who wrote your favorite character of all time? It’s another in her long, award winning series following Miles Naismith Vorkosigan through his life of adventure and mystery. (if you’ve read Bujold, you know why you never leave out Naismith in his name.) The soletta – the key to terraforming Komarr – has just been hit and almost catastrophically damaged by an ore freighter. Miles is a newly minted Imperial […]



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