Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Red for Murder

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

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When She Woke, by Hillary Jordan, is a work of speculative fiction, that I imagine feels far less speculative today than when it was published in 2011. The author doesn’t specify the year of our Lord in which this novel takes place, but it’s definitely in the future. Los Angeles has been nuked to filth. There are water wars in Northern Africa. There are “National Identity Cards” which allow the government to monitor and track citizenry. And there was a “superclap” pandemic which did nothing […]

Closing Some Doors, Some Still Open

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

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Capture the flag is now the name of the game in This Inevitable Ruin aka Dungeon Crawl Carl 7, or really more like capture the enemy castles and hold the throne rooms, and probably also kill all members of the enemy group. This is also the Faction Wars part, meaning that some of the other teams actually are from outside the dungeon, and are paying to participate. A lot of the outside groups are now eligible to directly participate, and several do. There’s an interesting […]

A Pokemon-Magic-Yugi-Oh Mishmash

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman

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The Eye of the Bedlam Bride one the one hand takes on the geek card game as its general dungeon challenge (it’s a cross between Magic the Gathering and Yugi-Oh, with a hint of morbid Pokemon, kinda), and on the other it’s set on sort of a ghost Earth, making it a chance for some significant backstory as well as possible foreshadowing. If it wasn’t clear already, the game-master AI is also becoming more of an element of the story, which could both be the […]

Hippos of the Deep South

American Hippo by Sarah Gailey

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In a world where the American Hippo bill passed (look it up, it was real!) and the vast Mississippi became the home of deadly feral hippo, Winslow Houndstooth and a crew of rogues, murderers, and con artists have been contracted to take it back. This book consists of the novellas River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow and two additional short stories, which all take place in this alternate United States and follow Winslow and his motley crew of hippo riders. Firstly, I love hippos, I love the idea of […]

Bear

Bear by Marian Engel

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Fishwives. Fishwidows. And we all set out to be mermaids. ― Marian Engel, Bear The world was furred with late spring snow. It was the soft, thick stuff that excites you unless you are driving or half dead, packing snow already falling in caterpillars off the greening branches. ― Marian Engel, Bear This is the story of a woman who sequesters herself in a remote area of Ontario, Canada, to catalog an estate bequeathed to the Canadian government. In her isolation, she finds herself, breaking […]

Black Cover and Maybe Some Black Hearts or not so Black

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

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Bingo 19: Black Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar has a cover almost entirely in the proper color. Mostly, this is a story about people who want things they think they either cannot or should not have. Luiza is part Jewish (dangerous during the Inquisition) and has some minor household magic; her milagritos are things like she can make the bread unburnt. She wants to be something more than the scullery maid; she wants better, more money, more comfort, just more. There’s also her boss Valentina who […]



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