Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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If stealing from dragons is bad, what about stealing for them?

Never Steal from Dragons by Patrick Dugan

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Never Steal From Dragons is a fun cozy sci-fi/fantasy heist adventure. A lot of the expected tropes are present: a group of very highly skilled but very different individuals are forcibly assembled by a mysterious powerful individual who wants them to steal something in return for basically making their dreams come true; it is of course an offer that cannot be refused. Chaos, clever remarks, etc. ensues. In the world of Harmony, there are any number of beings recognizable from folklore including pixies, dragons, kitsune, […]

Fever Dream on the Northern Atlantic

The Last One by Will Dean

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Her trip on the luxury ocean liner RMS Atlantica is supposed to be the vacation of a lifetime, but when Caz wakes up to find that every other person on the ship seems to have vanished, it becomes a waking nightmare instead. It’s a good thing I went on my first cruise before I read this book. Partly because it makes it easier to visualize the setting, and partly I probably would have been more anxious about wandering around its deserted decks or corridors late […]

Nowhere Nothing and I Don’t Care All At Once

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

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Potentially unpopular opinion forthcoming: I didn’t think The Atlas Six was all that great. There is little plot; not much happens in detail except time passing and people wondering what is going on with {insert current person and/or situation of concern here}. Not much happens with characters either; what is {person} hiding from the group and/or themselves? What is being hidden from them that might possibly matter? There is also not a lot of world building; this is a world in which there is magic […]

Another Airport Transit Read

Sleep Donation: A Novella by Karen Russell

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This is another book gifted to me by andtheIToldYouSos last year. And this also turned out to be a great little novella to slip into my handbag for those times I was transiting through airports—this time to Indianapolis. Sleep deprivation is a brutal thing; unfortunately in the last few months, I’ve experienced a good deal of that. However, in Sleep Donation,  loss of sleep has become the new pandemic. In its most extreme form, it kills. However, there is a therapy that has been developed […]

Ian Flemming Goes Cozy and Slightly Comedic

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

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I don’t know how John Scalzi would feel about his work being labeled “cozy” but that’s basically what Starter Villain is, a cozy adventure riffing in Scalzi fashion this time on the James Bond spy thriller. If you’ve read any of Scalzi’s more recent work, especially The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain will be kind of familiar. Take a down on his luck smarter than he might initially appear regular person, a former journalist now substitute teacher named Charlie, and throw him into an improbably […]

Of course cats are sentient and working with villains

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

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CBR15 Bingo: Adulthood – Charlie struggles with many of the downsides to adulthood, loans, parental loss, divorce, and barely scrapping by.  Bingo #3! History (replaced with Nostalgia) to Europe. John Scalzi is almost an auto buy for  our household.  However, the most recently trilogy had us feeling a little cold.  Then last year’s The Kaiju Preservation Society was a spectacular showcase of what makes Scalzi such a fun writer.  Based on The Kaiju Preservation Society I was already looking forward to my preorder of Scalzi’s newest […]



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